Death sentence a heinous political ploy By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Jan. 14, 2019

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/01/2019 (2181 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The death sentence China has imposed on Canadian tourist Robert Schellenberg is obviously a political act related to the China-U.S. trade war.

Mr. Schellenberg was serving a 15-year prison sentence for involvement in hiding methamphetamines inside tires in a warehouse in Dalian, China. He says he is innocent. The Chinese police had produced a witness and some evidence to support the conviction. After Canada, at the request of the U.S., arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, the Chinese authorities suddenly discovered new evidence against Mr. Schellenberg and this week held a new, unusually well-publicized trial in which they convicted him as a drug-smuggling kingpin. He was swiftly sentenced to death.

That makes three Canadian hostages China is holding and threatening on account of the Meng Wanzhou arrest. Ex-diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor were arrested soon after Ms. Meng’s arrest in Vancouver. Canada is taking one for the team here — three times over — in order to comply faithfully to our extradition treaty with the United States. The U.S. got us into this and the U.S. has to take a large role in solving the problem.

As long as Mr. Schellenberg is alive under sentence of death, China will see him as a means of putting pressure on Canada. If they kill him they will lose leverage. They will presumably keep him alive as long as he seems politically useful to them. Canada should therefore show great concern about his welfare, in the hope of keeping him alive.

We should not simply betray our neighbours by sending Ms. Meng back to China without regard for the extradition treaty. We have, however, the option of moving in that direction if we are unable to win U.S. co-operation in bringing an early resolution of the growing dispute.

Canada’s message to the U.S., couched in the politest possible diplomatic language, should be clear and, in its implications, brutally frank.

We will not indefinitely put up with maltreatment of Canadians in China in support of a U.S. political strategy that does us no good. If the U.S. shows it is going to reach a settlement with China which includes the release of China’s Canadian hostages, then we will do our best to honour the extradition request. But the case against Meng Wanzhou had better be good and it has to be resolved without delay.

Some of the oldest known Chinese writing is found on oracle bones from the Shang dynasty of the second millennium BCE, in which the king asks diviners whether he should kill the hostages. The diviners were to find the answer by heating the tortoise shell and then reading the resulting cracks. We know by this that the Chinese have been studying hostage-management for a very long time.

Canadians have less experience in this field. In some circumstances, the astute response to this kind of blackmail would be to send Mr. Schellenberg a warm farewell message and promise him a first-class memorial service. In this case, however, a far better solution is available.

That solution, however, lies in the hands of U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration, whose capacity for careful reasoning and consistent policy has yet to be determined. He has declared that he is smarter than all previous U.S. presidents. Now, we’ll see how well he deals with Chinese hostage-takers.