The Huawei Divergence

The arrest of Meng Wanzhou could further divide the world into U.S. and Chinese economic spheres.

- Michael Schuman

I’m an American journalist who lives in Beijing, but I just happened to be visiting South Korea when news broke that Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co., had been arrested in Canada on Dec. 1. She was detained at the behest of the U.S. for allegedly misleading financial institutions about the company’s Iran business, causing them to violate U.S. sanctions. I called my wife, who works in the Chinese capital too, and joked about this ominous turn in Chinese-American relations: “Maybe it’s safer not to go back.”

The quip turned out not to be very funny after I did return. Within days, Chinese authorities scooped up two Canadian citizens who, despite Beijing’s denials, were soon seen by the outside world as pawns in China’s attempts to extract Meng from Canadian—and potential U.S.—custody. In Vancouver, Meng received a public hearing in an independent court. That’s in contrast to China, where it’s still unclear why the Canadians were detained and where, more fundamentally, law can be contravened by power and judges are instruments of the Communist Party. Even foreign nationals can vanish into prison cells. For now, the detention of Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat who works for a policy think tank, and Michael Spavor, a businessman, have made expatriate Americans like me worry how much we’re at Beijing’s mercy. In a similar way, Chinese businessmen saw Meng’s arrest as a disincentive to traveling to and investing in the U.S.

The detentions are the most frightening development yet taken in the widening confrontation between the U.S. and China. What started as a scuffle over tariffs and trade balances, then expanded into a battle for control of future technologies, may be degenerating into an intimate war against each other’s people. That makes it directly personal in a way trade and tariffs weren’t.