By Jerome A. Cohen
As I have written here before, in the Gao Zhan espionage case in 2001, the US State Dept and the PRC MOFA quietly agreed that she would be released on ostensible medical grounds but only after first being convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Her trial followed shortly afterward, and she was released 48 hours after sentencing. Because of the added Meng extradition element in the current Canadian dispute with China, the Gao Zhan case is not analogous to that of the two Michaels but its resolution is relevant. Although Gao was not yet an American citizen, she was on the cusp, and she had tremendous public support from the US academic community because she was a US-trained and US-based scholar of Chinese society engaged in fieldwork in China. Her detention and prosecution seemed to threaten all serious foreign scholars working in China. Only later was it discovered that she had been secretly working for Taiwan intelligence - as well as also earning a living by illegally exporting to the PRC American high-tech electronic equipment that was banned from export under the US Trading with the Enemy Act. This was no simple multitasking but “walking on two legs” following Mao’s famous maxim.
Although I believe, with Trudeau, that Canada should not yield to PRC hostage diplomacy, if it should do so eventually, it should certainly not do so on the basis of the PRC first convicting the two Michaels of the crime charged. They could instead be released sequentially on one medical excuse or other prior to trial. The PRC might try to negotiate their convictions for respective minor offenses as a face-saving measure in a pathetic attempt to justify their long, barbaric detentions. Years ago, during the Jiang Zemin era, when at trial a courageous defense lawyer demonstrated that the PRC could not plausibly convict a Chinese employee of the NYTimes Beijing Bureau of leaking state secrets to a foreign organization, in order to justify the years of his pre-trial detention the Beijing High Court convicted him of a much lesser, unrelated offense that had arisen from what was really more of a civil dispute than a criminal matter. 政治掛帥, zhengzhi guashuai! Politics is always in command of the Chinese courts, as Xi Jinping and his minions repeatedly advocate.