As Huawei Talks Stall, Detention of Two Canadians in China Drags On

Canadian businessman Michael Spavor called his country’s Beijing embassy from an airport in China’s northeast. He was being questioned by authorities after being blocked from boarding a flight out of China.

Concern at the embassy over the call shifted to alarm when officials learned another Canadian had been apprehended in Beijing that day, on Dec. 10, 2018, according to people familiar with the matter. This time, it was former diplomat Michael Kovrig.

Since then, the two men have been thrust to the center of a high-stakes standoff between Canada, the U.S. and China, where they have been detained and accused of espionage. Hope had surged recently among family members and supporters that the men might be released if separate talks to resolve criminal charges against Meng Wanzhou, an executive at China’s Huawei Technologies Co., bore fruit. Canada has accused China of detaining the two men in retaliation for Ms. Meng’s arrest on a U.S. extradition request.

With both sides digging in on demands too far to bridge, those discussions stalled and are now dormant, according to people familiar with the matter. The Biden administration could revisit the talks in the coming months, the people said, but the timing of any such movement is unclear. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on a phone call earlier this month that the U.S. would do everything it could to get the two men released.

Matthew Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser for former President Donald Trump, described the two Canadians as hostages. “I have every confidence that they would be part of any kind of settlement that could possibly occur between the Department of Justice and Huawei,” he said earlier this month at a conference organized by Florida International University, adding the deal should include an admission of wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Meng or Huawei.

The U.S. has alleged Ms. Meng misled banks about Huawei’s ties to a subsidiary that did business in Iran, leading those banks to clear hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions that potentially violated international sanctions. Ms. Meng and Huawei have denied any wrongdoing.

China’s Foreign Ministry said that Canada had aided the U.S. in what it called a political arrest of Ms. Meng that was aimed at suppressing China’s technological development. It said the arrests of the two Canadians were completely different from Ms. Meng’s case, saying the two men are suspected of committing crimes that endangered China’s national security.

In the more than two years they have been detained, the two men have had only limited contact with their families and the outside world. They are largely restricted to supervised visits with Canadian consular officials and their China-based lawyers. They are allowed to correspond by mail occasionally. Mr. Kovrig has been allowed two phone calls with family and Mr. Spavor, one, according to people familiar with the matter.

Their detentions have at times taken their toll on the two men. Among the most trying periods, according to those people, was the initial six months when they were both held at separate undisclosed locations and subjected to a coercive Chinese detention process that involved nightly interrogations, sleep deprivation and confinement in guarded rooms.

“It was grueling,” said Michael Kovrig’s wife, Vina Nadjibulla, who has been separated from him since 2017, but remains a close friend and his family’s liaison with Canadian officials.

“He was in a cell by himself for six months, with the lights on 24 hours a day and constant interrogations. He was sleep deprived and very stressed during that period,” she said.

The harsh tactics endured by the two Canadians are part of a system in China called “residential surveillance at a designated location” that Canada and other countries have condemned as a violation of human rights.

Mr. Kovrig, the former diplomat, was questioned repeatedly about his work and that of colleagues at the Canadian embassy in Beijing, other people said. Such interrogations could breach an international convention that shields current and former diplomats from foreign states seeking information, the people said.

China’s foreign ministry said the two men have been handled within the judicial system and in accordance with the rights the law affords them.

A spokeswoman for Canada’s foreign affairs department said the government remains deeply concerned about what it called the arbitrary detention of the two Canadians, but declined to discuss details of their imprisonment.

Mr. Spavor’s family declined through an intermediary to comment on the circumstances of his imprisonment.

After the first six months, the men were moved in 2019 to separate prisons where they were allowed contact with other prisoners. Mr. Kovrig was moved to a prison less than 20 miles from the Canadian embassy in Beijing. Mr. Spavor was transferred to a detention center in the Chinese city of Dandong, where he lived, near North Korea, according to people familiar with the matter.

Family and friends helped Mr. Kovrig recover from the grim prison initiation by sending him books on stoicism, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela and lyrics to one of his favorite songs, Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” He has since improved his physical and mental health through reading and a daily regimen that includes yoga and 7,000 walking steps around his small, windowless cell, Ms. Nadjibulla said.

During their detentions, many have come to see them as a stark illustration of the risks for foreign professionals drawn to the world’s second-largest economy.

Mr. Kovrig had left Canada in the mid-1990s to join a wave of young Western expats who flooded into once-closed Eastern European countries undergoing economic transformations. After living in Budapest, where he worked as a journalist and sang in a punk band, he enrolled in the graduate international affairs program at Columbia University in 2001. One of his classmates was Ms. Nadjibulla, who said they were both moved to work in public service in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York, which they witnessed from the rooftop of a university building.

“We wanted to have a life of service and consequence,” Ms. Nadjibulla said.

Mr. Spavor had left his home in Calgary, Alberta, in 1997, when he signed up for a three-month stint teaching English in South Korea. He ended up staying, finding odd jobs before getting hired to work for a South Korean tourism organization.

In 2001, Mr. Spavor joined a government-supervised tourist trip to the secretive state of North Korea. He was enthralled by the people and its untapped economic potential and shifted his focus to arranging tours and promoting business in the struggling country. His outgoing nature and command of the Korean language helped.

“Michael fell in love with Korea, its people and its ancient culture,” said Brian Gold, who teaches Korean and East Asian history at the University of Alberta and first met him in Alberta in 2013 when Mr. Spavor was visiting his family.

Mr. Spavor had moved to China by 2013 when he got a call to help facilitate a second North Korean trip by the former Chicago Bulls basketball star Dennis Rodman, who had developed his own fascination with the nation and its young leader, Kim Jong Un. The group visited the North Korean beach resort of Wonsan, where Mr. Spavor met with Mr. Kim.

A year later in 2014, Mr. Spavor met Mr. Kovrig at a dinner in Beijing, the beginning of what became a friendship, Ms. Nadjibulla said, based on their mutual interest in China’s relations with North Korea.

Mr. Kovrig had been hired into Canada’s foreign service and eventually selected in 2012 for a post in the country’s embassy in China. After two years of intensive Mandarin language training, he and Ms. Nadjibulla departed for Beijing, where Mr. Kovrig was assigned to research China’s relations with neighboring countries, particularly North Korea.

Guy Saint-Jacques, Canada’s ambassador to China at the time Mr. Kovrig joined the embassy, said the new hire was “a bit of an introvert” but also fearless about traveling to remote areas in China near Tibet and the North Korean border to gather on-the-ground information.

Mr. Kovrig took leave from the embassy in 2016, moved to Hong Kong and joined a Belgium-based policy firm, International Crisis Group. He was working there as a senior adviser analyzing China and its relations with countries in Northeast Asia at the time of his arrest.

By 2018, Mr. Spavor’s touring and consulting business in Dandong, Paektu Cultural Exchange, had picked up after years of modest income promoting sports events, tours and charities in North Korea, according to friends. One of his biggest sources of income was consulting for Chinese businesses about expanding into North Korea, they said.

On Dec. 1 of that year, Canadian authorities stopped Ms. Meng as she transited through the international airport in Vancouver. Just over a week later, China detained Messrs. Spavor and Kovrig. Two years on, the men are still in jail.

Days before Christmas, China allowed Mr. Spavor to speak to his father and siblings for the first time since his arrest on a phone call. Mr. Kovrig was also granted his second family call at the same time.

“There is a little hopefulness now,” said Ms. Nadjibulla, who joined the call with Mr. Kovrig.

Photo: A man holds a sign with photos of Mr. Kovrig and Michael Spavor outside a court in Vancouver where Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was attending a hearing in January 2020. -  DARRYL DYCK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Link: As Huawei Talks Stall, Detention of Two Canadians in China Drags On - WSJ