By Jerome A. Cohen
This recent Wall Street Journal article reports that Chinese officials have threatened to detain U.S. citizens in response to the Justice Department’s prosecution of Chinese military-affiliated scholars. The case of the two Canadian Michaels shows that this may not be an empty threat. Both men were swiftly detained following the initiation of extradition proceedings against Huawei’s Ms. Meng in Vancouver. It will be two years in December and there is no prospect of their release since the Canadian case moves forward at a snail’s pace. So, we know that the PRC may well mean business in threatening to detain Americans in retaliation for prosecutions in the US.
Yet the PRC has suffered a huge amount of international condemnation for this blatant example of “hostage diplomacy,” and an obvious effort to extend this practice to a number of Americans will outrage and disgust the liberal democratic world while perhaps pleasing many other nations in the UN that support or fail to criticize the PRC’s human rights violations.
The PRC appears to recognize the grave consequences that would result from a blatant resort to detentions as threatened, which may be why several months have passed with no obvious retaliatory detentions. Perhaps, as with so many other aspects of Sino-American relations, Beijing is awaiting the outcome of the American election. If it should follow through on these threats, it would be providing an enormous stimulus to significant further “decoupling.” Can that be in Beijing’s interest? There must be intense debate at the top.