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Tuesday, July 14, 2020

The case of Huawei: How that impacts Canada-China relations

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Nikhita Gautam
Nikhita Gautam
North America

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Nikhita Gautam

Article Title

The case of Huawei: How that impacts Canada-China relations

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

July 14, 2020

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Huawei office in Canada

Huawei office in Canada | Raysonho via Wikimedia

In December 2018, Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer for Huawei, a China-based tech company which is dominating the telecom supplies, was arrested in Vancouver, Canada on her flight stop to Mexico. This was done on a request from the USA with whom Canada has an extradition treaty. She was sought by the USA for allegedly dealing with Iran using an American banking system in spite of the sanctions placed on Iran by the country, in 2013. In May, Wanzhou lost the legal challenge to the extradition process, meaning that they will go ahead with the extradition proceedings.

Within days of Wanzhou’s arrest, two Canadian citizens in China were arrested on alleged accounts of spying. This is seen as a retaliation for the Wangzhou arrest by the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who says that there is a direct link between Wanzhou’s arrest and those of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig,  the Canadians who are detained in China. Though China has been tight-lipped about the link between the two, these two incidents are often raised jointly by the Chinese spokesperson. David Mulroney, former ambassador for Canada to China, has said that the officials in Beijing are mirroring the ongoing extradition case to that of the detained Canadians.

Although Mr. Trudeau has in the past repeatedly emphasized the need for good relations with China, and has enthusiastically worked on them to the point of agreeing to discuss a Canada-China extradition treaty. But the China-Canada relations already started souring much before the arrest after a trade deal fell through in 2017. Many major carriers in the country, some of which have been outspoken in their support of Huawei, have decided to shun the company and opt for western alternatives instead. One of them, Bell Mobility, even announced that it will use equipment from its Finnish rival, Nokia.

Huawei is considered a symbol for China’s technological prowess, and the arrest is seen by the Chinese Communist Party as an attack on its symbol of technological achievement. The Chinese state-owned newspaper the Global Times calls the act a “political persecution launched by the US, with the intention to contain China’s high-tech development.” The China Daily also criticized the court ruling as unfair and potentially harmful in mending the Canada-China relations.

There has also been a backlash from legal experts and family members of the detained Canadians on the Canadian policy of letting the extradition charges proceed and not going with a prisoner swap. Mr. Mulroney, however, feels that it would legitimize “hostage diplomacy”, which would put at risk all traveling Canadians for arbitrary arrests to gain political leverage. There is a stark difference between the condition of the hostages and that of Meng Wanzhou, for while the two prisoners spend their days in small cells in isolation, interrupted by interrogation and bland meals, Wanzhou lives in her Vancouver mansion, being happy about the fact that she can spend more time reading and oil painting, now.

The Canadian government is also claiming that it has to let the extradition process go on without political interference as to not compromise the independent, legal decision of surrendering the Huawei CFO. Mr. Mulroney has said that “it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. It would compromise the integrity of both our democracy and our justice system,” and that their values need to count for something. Brian Greenspan, a Toronto lawyer with experience on extradition cases, has said that the government has the power to withdraw from the extradition case, and that the lessons from a previous case in which political pressure affected an international case, are being applied wrongly here.

There are many sides to this tension, complicated by previous feuds, economic decisions, the detentions of the Canadians and Wanzhou and the difference between the political and the legal, and the many opinions on whether it should be that way.

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February 4, 2021 4:52 PM

Persecution of Uighur Muslims in China and the silence of Muslim Countries

Uighur are natives of  Xinjiang province of China who are Muslims and regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. Xinjiang province has been under the control of China since it was annexed in 1949 and many Uighurs still identify their homeland by its previous name, East Turkestan. There are around 11 million Uighurs in Xinjiang and China claims that Uighurs hold extremist views that are a threat to national security.

In 2017, the Xinjiang government passed a law prohibiting men from growing long beards and women from wearing veils and dozens of mosques were also demolished.

As per the report of UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Descrimination, the Chinese government has detained at least one million Uighurs in the detention camps in Xinjiang, China. After denying the existence of the camps for a long time, when the photos of the camps emerged, the Chinese government called them “re-education centres'' for Uighurs though the former detainees said they were detained, interrogated and beaten because of their religion, and not “re-educated.”

In July 2019 to the U.N. Human Right Council, 22 countries, mainly European countries, responded to “disturbing reports of large scale arbitrary detentions of Uighurs” and condemned the Chinese leadership.

Four days later, 37 countries, defended China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights” by protecting the country from “terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.” The list of the 37 countries also included Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar etc.

At the end of October 2019, 23 countries including France, the United Kingdom, United States denounced the repression of the Uighurs at the UN Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs. Nevertheless, Beijing won the support of 54 countries, who praised the Communist Party’s management of Xinjiang.

In February 2019, Saudi Arabia showed their “respect” for Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader before they signed major commercial contracts with China. Egypt wants Beijing to finance its infrastructure and hence allowed the Chinese police to interrogate Uighur exiles on its soil in 2017. Pakistan, who has talked about the mistreatment of Rohingyas, has been silent on Uighurs since the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is going on in the country.

Even Iran, who issues occasional criticism wants support from China and hence keeps the criticism coded. “There is a lot of sympathy for the Uighurs in Turkey, but the reality is that Erdogan needs China as an ally for economic reasons and to counteract the West’s diplomatic pressure on issues like Syria,” said Rémi Castets, a political scientist.

In 2017, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation responded very differently to the Rohingya Crisis (Myanmar’s military crackdown on the country’s Rohingyas), where countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey defended the rights of the Muslim minority group in Myanmar and actively condemned the treatment of Rohingyas in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.  

The question here arises is that contrary to the sentiments of their citizens, why do Muslim states stay silent over China’s abuse of the Uighurs?

Sophie Richardson, the director of China at Human Rights Watch, has a short and simple answer — there is less solidarity for Uighur than Rohingyas or Palestinians because China has managed to win these countries’ support due to its economic might.

Only time will tell how long these countries will continue to give preference to the economic interests over the anti-China sentiments of the citizens.

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