Huawei Scapegoats

China Charges 2 Canadians With Spying

By Chris Buckley and Javier C. Hernández

Outside the Canadian Embassy in Beijing in December. China’s detention of two Canadians that month roiled relations between the two countries.

BEIJING — Two Canadian men detained in China since December have been formally arrested on espionage charges, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday, in a move likely to ratchet up tensions between China and Canada that broke out with the arrest of Huawei's Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver.
Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat who was detained while visiting Beijing, was charged with “gathering state secrets and intelligence for abroad,” while Michael Spavor, a business consultant who was detained in northeast China, was accused of “stealing and providing state secrets for abroad,” Lu Kang, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, said at a regularly scheduled news briefing.
The vague reference to unspecified overseas entities left open the question of whether the men were suspected of working for a government or for some other organization.
The charges are likely to anger the government of Canada who condemned the initial detentions of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor as “arbitrary” and politically motivated.
Their detentions were retaliation for the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, at the behest of the United States.
The United States has pressured allies not to use Huawei’s technology, arguing that China could use it to spy on other countries. 
Those efforts intensified on Wednesday, when President Trump moved to ban American telecommunications firms from installing China-made equipment that could pose risks to national security.
The measure seemed aimed at blocking sales by Huawei.

Michael Kovrig

Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor were seized by the police in December, days after Meng was arrested while changing planes in Vancouver.
The Chinese government was incensed by Meng’s arrest, and the charging of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor makes it more likely that they will face trial and conviction, deepening the standoff with Trudeau’s administration.
Lu did not provide further details and said only that the arrests were made recently.
Before the latest announcement, Chinese officials had already signaled that Mr. Kovrig and Spavor could be charged with espionage offenses.
Mr. Kovrig worked for the United Nations and the Canadian foreign service before 2017, when he joined the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that tries to defuse conflicts between states.
He focused on Chinese foreign policy, Asian regional politics and North Korea, and he was often quoted in foreign news outlets and invited to meetings in China.
Mr. Spavor followed a less conventional path, using his knowledge of the Korean language to establish himself as a consultant for companies and people interested in North Korea, including Dennis Rodman, the former basketball star who has befriended the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
Mr. Spavor was detained in Dandong, the Chinese city on the North Korean border where he was based.
In early March, a legal affairs committee within China’s ruling Communist Party said investigators believed that Mr. Kovrig had been “stealing and spying to obtain state secrets and intelligence,” and that Mr. Spavor had supplied him with information.

Michael Spavor

But China’s definition of state secrets is opaque, and the International Crisis Group has said Mr. Kovrig’s work for it was in no way nefarious.
Since they were detained, Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor have been held in secretive detention sites, without visits from lawyers and family members.
Canadian diplomats have been allowed to visit them about once a month.
Lu, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, did not respond to questions Thursday about where the two men were being held.
Human rights advocates on Thursday denounced the arrests of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor.
“Their cases show again how the Chinese criminal system violates the human rights of detainees,” said Patrick Poon, a researcher for Amnesty International in Hong Kong.
He called on Chinese officials to release the men, absent “credible and concrete evidence” of crimes.
Meanwhile, Meng has been granted bail as she fights extradition to the United States to face criminal charges.
Her lawyers have said that they would sue Canadian border services, the police and the federal government for violating her constitutional rights when she was detained for three hours in December before being arrested.
In January, American prosecutors released an indictment of Meng and Huawei, laying out efforts by the company to steal commercial secrets, obstruct a criminal inquiry and engage in bank fraud while trying to evade American sanctions on Iran. 
The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, said at a news conference in early March that the case against Huawei and Meng was “by no means a purely judicial case, but rather a deliberate political case” intended to bring down Huawei.
Trudeau and Canadian and United States officials have said that the case against Meng is a legal matter, not a political one.
But Trump veered from that position in December, when he suggested that he could intervene in the case if that helped to seal a trade agreement with China.