Substack Strategic Narratives, 27.09.2026 Michael Kovrig, embajador ® y analista geopolítico canadiense
- As Trump hosts Xi, Huawei goes on trial, and Beijing keeps arbitrarily detaining other countries’ citizens, the geopolitical tensions of the Meng-Michaels crisis are still with us
Five years ago this week, I left China after its Communist Party finally agreed to a negotiated end to my wrongful detention there. I’d been a political hostage in its ruthless ploy to coerce Canada into releasing a Chinese telecom executive. For the anniversary of my liberation, this post collects most of what I’ve said publicly about the ordeal and its implications. You’ll have to wait a while longer to read the full account of what happened. The story has many layers, and it’s still not over.
Just as the echoes of what became known as the Meng-Michaels crisis still reverberate through me personally, so too its security, economic and legal aftershocks are still rattling relations among Canada, China and the United States.
The Same Three Players, Five Years On
General Secretary Xi Jinping almost certainly personally approved both my abduction and my release 1,019 days later. With unsettling synchronicity, he has spent much of the week on a state visit to Washington for a summit with the U.S. president whose administration precipitated the crisis, Donald Trump. The meetings seem to be mostly about burnishing their status as strongman leaders as I explained in The Diplomat. Read or listen to more of my analysis on CBC’s “As it Happens”.
In a second synchronicity, the U.S. government’s slow-burning legal case against the telecom company, Huawei Technologies, began hearings this month in the New York Eastern District Court — with Federal Prosecutor Taylor Stout calling the PRC tech titan a “criminal enterprise". Huawei faces charges of racketeering conspiracy, violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and stealing trade secrets. Expect the trial to take many months.
Completing the synchronicity trifecta, once again Washington is pressuring Ottawa, mainly through tariffs, in part to align with its economic statecraft against China, as I argue in a new op-ed. As for the third leader involved in the original bizarre geopolitical triangle, Canada’s then-PM Justin Trudeau, well, you’ll have to ask Katy Perry.
My own ordeal as the CCP’s hostage began in December 2018 when Canada detained Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. warrant to arrest and extradite on charges of violating sanctions on Iran and financial fraud. Canada was following longstanding standard procedure under its bilateral extradition treaty with the United States. There was no political involvement by Ottawa, and indeed Canadians soon wished they had never been involved. I explained the context in an interview (clip above) with Al Jazeera’s Peter Dobbie on Dec. 6.
Four days later, under Xi’s direction, China’s Party-state instrumentalized two innocent Canadian citizens — Michael Spavor and me — as bargaining chips and later imposed de facto economic sanctions to pressure the Prime Minister and Justice Minister to intervene in the Meng case, which they refused to do.
Resolving the standoff in a manner that enabled all three governments to preserve their reputations took heroic advocacy and diplomacy by Vina Nadjibulla, Dominic Barton, Kirsten Hillman, my partner and family, the International Crisis Group, and so many other steadfast officials, friends, colleagues, and experts that naming them all would fill a Substack post. I’m forever grateful to all, and over the years since — when not busy caring for my loved ones, rebuilding my life and getting back to work researching, analyzing, writing, and advocating — I’ve tried to personally thank everyone who contributed.
If you were one of them and I haven’t expressed my gratitude to you directly, please consider yourself profusely thanked, and feel free to reach out. Connecting deeply and meaningfully with so many extraordinary people has been one of the highlights of the past half-decade. Not a day has gone by for me without some moment of reflection on the experience and appreciation for your help. Indeed, for the past five years, I’ve appreciated every sunrise and sunset I’ve been able to see, and much else in my life, even as I grapple with frustration at much that’s going wrong in the world.
Canada returned all of Meng’s personal property to her. China has so far refused to reciprocate for me. Most of the psychological and physiological damage that the MSS and confinement inflicted has healed, but some of it likely never can.
I still consider myself fortunate. Extradition experts have told me that if Meng’s court process in Vancouver had run its full legal course, including all possible avenues of appeal, it could have continued until 2026. Eight years after I was wrongly detained, I could still be confined to a single cell in the Beijing State Security Bureau’s #1 detention centre or a prison, with any resolution contingent on Meng’s fate. U.S. federal prosecutors wanted to question the Huawei CFO in their court. Instead, they’ve had to settle for her signature on a deferred prosecution agreement — which U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly has deemed admissible as evidence in the current Huawei trial.
Decisions by Trump, Xi and the political systems they’ve shaped ultimately created that avoidable crisis. The CCP General Secretary has accumulated many titles and epithets. I hope those shaking hands with the “chairman of everything” and embracing his minions remember that he’s also China’s chief hostage-taker. Xi and his officials try to present themselves as responsible stewards of a “more multipolar” international order. But a glance at his relentless purges of his own cadres and generals, and his repeated arbitrary detentions of foreign citizens, makes clear this is a mirage. What Xi is really offering is a methodical authoritarian power that treats humans as mere means to ends and is exploiting global disarray to advance the interests of its own elites. A senior MI6 officer once aptly characterized the Party-state as “a secret service with a state attached to it, not the other way round.” The implication for individual foreign citizens is that its security organs may detain you for political purposes.
Last year, for The Wire China, I described several such cases, and then expanded that catalogue of suffering and assessed the risks for visitors here at Strategic Narratives.
The forced disappearances keep coming
My own case was unique but sadly not the only example of arbitrary detention in China. What the Ministry of State Security did to me, they continue to do to others (mostly China’s own citizens) often under an abhorrent procedure that hides behind a deceptive PRC legal term, “residential surveillance in designated location” (RSDL). Enforced disappearances, hostage-taking, arbitrary detention, solitary confinement, coercive interrogations, torture, isolation, and other human rights abuses continue because Xi Jinping and his loyal cadres evidently consider using individual civilians for leverage to be a morally acceptable tool of statecraft — never mind that it’s illegal to do so in war or peacetime.
On June 3, Min Zin, an American scholar of Myanmar, flew to Kunming at the invitation of a Chinese professor and vanished into one of the Guoanbu’s black jails. He’s reportedly being held under RSDL in a windowless room lit around the clock, coercively interrogated for hours a day, without any formal charges.
Youlin Chen, an American seismologist whose research helped detect North Korea’s nuclear tests, has been held since November 2024 and interrogated more than a hundred times. Washington has designated both men wrongfully detained, and U.S. Senators on Sept. 25 introduced a bipartisan resolution condemning China’s “repeated pattern of arbitrary or wrongful detention” of American academics and urging the return of Zin and Chen.
A Czech businessman, Aleš K., was detained this summer, mere months after Prague arrested a man it identified as a Chinese intelligence officer. To me, that sequence looks painfully familiar.
These three new victims, all of whom travelled to China on apparently legitimate business, are now among scores of foreign citizens the PRC is illegitimately holding, some for so long that the world has nearly forgotten. Others include Huseyin Celil, a Canadian Uyghur activist abducted in Uzbekistan and handed over to state security twenty years ago; Gui Minhai, a Swedish-Chinese publisher seized in Thailand in 2015; and Minnie Chan, the South China Morning Post’s defence correspondent, who hasn’t been seen in public since covering Beijing’s Xiangshan security forum three years ago. Everything points to her being in MSS custody. People well-placed to know believe her disappearance is linked to the investigation of General Zhang Youxia, who this week was expelled from the CCP after months of detention and investigation.
I regained my freedom because enough people with power and influence made it costly for Beijing to keep me while providing a face-saving concession on the one thing it demanded. These wrongful detentions won’t end until someone does the same for them. Each time Trump and his officials speak with Xi, they should show him pictures of these prisoners, humanize them, call for their immediate release, and make clear that continuing to hold them unjustly will bring cost-benefit-calculus-shifting consequences. Every other official who subsequently meets the CCP General Secretary should do the same until each and every one of them is free.
The point they should make to Xi Jinping is simple: Abducting and torturing people makes you look bad. It’s a tactic of the weak. It tarnishes your image, and if you want to be recognized and respected as serious statesman leading a risen and rejuvenated China, then stop behaving like a criminal thug. It’s totally unnecessary for achieving your stated objectives.
