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1:26

worldwide Michael Kovrig was a Canadian

1:28

diplomat when I first met him in Beijing

1:30

in 2015. We

1:33

chewed over various stories, and I remember

1:35

talking to him about how difficult it

1:37

was to understand a political system that

1:39

was so hard to penetrate. Unfortunately,

1:43

Michael got an unparalleled insight

1:45

into that system. After

1:47

leaving the diplomatic corps and joining an NGO,

1:50

in 2018 he was detained by

1:52

the Chinese authorities and ultimately

1:55

held for over 1,000 days. Today,

1:58

David Rennie interviews... Michael Kovrig

2:00

about that experience. It's

2:03

an extraordinary story of time spent

2:05

inside the Chinese Communist Party's security

2:07

machine and a unique lens

2:09

onto Xi Jinping's China. In

2:31

my years as a journalist in China, there's

2:34

one evening that stands out. It

2:36

was December 2018. The

2:38

foreign community in Beijing was in

2:40

shock. There's now

2:43

a report that a Canadian has been detained in

2:45

China. We're talking about a former diplomat for this

2:47

country. We have a picture of him for you

2:49

right here. His name is Michael Kovrig. A

2:53

former Canadian diplomat turned researcher

2:55

Michael Kovrig had just been

2:58

snatched from the streets of the Chinese capital

3:00

by secret police. Late

3:05

that winter night, a friend of Kovrig's got

3:07

in touch and asked me to join a few

3:10

fellow foreign correspondents for a briefing

3:12

from an eyewitness to his detention.

3:17

It was late and the night was

3:20

polluted and cold. I cycled

3:22

to one of the city's diplomatic compounds,

3:25

a well-guarded cluster of concrete office

3:27

buildings and apartments, off

3:29

limits to ordinary Chinese. It

3:33

took us a while to decide on a safe place

3:35

to meet. I remember walking

3:37

around in the dark with a handful of

3:39

colleagues. Finally,

3:41

we ended up in the kitchen of a newspaper

3:43

office and there we met Kovrig's

3:46

partner, someone many of us

3:48

knew as a China researcher and analyst. It

3:51

was an intensely cold war-ish moment. We

3:54

could have been in Moscow in the 1960s. And

3:58

for that small band of journalists, there,

4:00

sipping our late night tea. This

4:03

detention was more than a personal crisis for

4:05

Michael Kovrig and his loved ones. It

4:07

was more than a big news story. It

4:11

was also our biggest fear playing

4:13

out in front of us. Foreigners

4:17

in China live with the knowledge that somewhere

4:19

out of sight, China's security

4:21

machine is watching. Now

4:24

it has shown itself. When

4:32

it happened to me, as it happened to me,

4:34

I had a very acute,

4:37

almost quiet-minded sense of living

4:39

through my worst-case scenario. Back

4:42

in 2018, Kovrig's was a name I

4:45

knew, but I'd never met him in

4:47

person. Now, in

4:49

2024, he's talking publicly

4:52

for the first time about his years

4:54

in detention in China. They

4:57

pushed me into the SUV and

5:00

just as I was disappearing into

5:02

it, I looked back and my

5:04

partner and I looked at each other and I

5:07

just tried to send her a signal that,

5:09

you know, take care of

5:11

yourself, take care of our baby, get help.

5:15

I will get out of this. Kovrig's

5:17

partner was almost six months pregnant. They

5:20

just shoved me into the backseat,

5:22

handcuffed me, blindfolded me, officers sat

5:24

on either side of me. And

5:26

if you've never been handcuffed in

5:28

a situation, that kind of icy

5:30

metallic feel of handcuffs closing around

5:32

your wrists is a

5:34

very disturbing sensation.

5:37

Part of the horror of it is that it imposes

5:39

on you a completely different identity.

5:41

We spend our lifetimes kind of developing

5:43

a sense of who we are. Those

5:46

handcuffs get slapped on you and suddenly

5:48

there's an implication that you're a wrongdoer.

5:52

Soon Kovrig was accused of crimes

5:54

against state security. In

5:56

reality, he was a hostage, a

5:59

Canadian citizen. caught up in

6:01

the crossfire of the China-U.S. rivalry.

6:04

His plight became a diplomatic

6:06

incident that made headlines around the

6:08

world. Canada

6:11

may now be caught up in

6:13

the fight between China and Washington,

6:16

a diplomatic dispute that could drag

6:18

this country into the trade war

6:20

between the two superpowers. Kubrick's

6:22

wife spoke to Global News about the 18 agonizing

6:25

months he spent behind bars. Coronavirus

6:28

has taken a toll on two Canadian citizens

6:31

stuck in a prison in China for the

6:33

last 500 days. It

6:36

has been a thousand days since Michael

6:38

Spavor and Michael Kovrig were detained by

6:40

the Chinese government. In all,

6:43

he spent a thousand nineteen days in detention.

6:46

But for Kovrig, each day was

6:48

a struggle to endure. The

6:50

interrogator sitting at the desk, on

6:53

that day he had a single piece of paper

6:55

from which he read from in a monotone voice.

6:58

Four days ago, your

7:01

partner gave birth to a baby girl.

7:04

Mother and daughter are healthy. That's

7:07

all I have for you today. He

7:10

gets up and walks out and leaves me sitting in the chair for

7:12

the rest of the morning, locked into it.

7:25

Now, on the third anniversary of his release,

7:27

Michael Kovrig has lessons to share. I'm

7:31

David Rennie, the Economist's Geopolitics Editor. And

7:36

over the next two episodes of Drum Tower, I'll

7:39

be talking with Michael Kovrig about his detention and what

7:41

it tells us about the China of Xi Jinping. This

7:46

is Drum Tower from The Economist. I'm

8:03

sitting in a hotel in Canada, face

8:05

to face, with a man whose

8:08

fate haunted every Western diplomat, researcher

8:10

and journalist in Beijing. In

8:13

person, Kovrig is tall, dark

8:15

and intense. And he

8:18

takes me back to the years that he worked

8:20

as a diplomat at the Canadian Embassy in China

8:22

from 2014 to 2016. I'm

8:26

a big city guy, so I

8:28

found the energy and intensity and

8:30

complexity of Beijing fascinating and very

8:33

energizing. One of the most useful

8:35

things that I did as a diplomat in terms

8:37

of trying to get to know Chinese people, I

8:39

joined a couple of wine appreciation

8:41

societies. I like to go a lot

8:43

to little music bars and jazz

8:45

bars. But that's one thing that

8:47

strikes you about Beijing also for a city of its

8:50

size, the sort of informal

8:52

culture, right? The culture of the

8:54

people there, music, other performances,

8:56

entertainment is really thin on the ground. But

8:58

at least, yeah, in 2014, there was still

9:00

a lot of fun and interesting things to

9:03

do that way. It also had an

9:05

interesting art scene. And I tried for

9:07

diversity to try to get involved in those things,

9:09

but also because those were good ways of meeting

9:11

people and just immersing yourself in Chinese culture, partly

9:14

because it was so hard to have

9:16

meaningful conversations in official meetings. In

9:20

2017, Kovrik took leave of

9:22

absence from the Canadian Foreign Service. He

9:25

wanted to keep working on China,

9:28

so he joined the International Crisis

9:30

Group, a Brussels-based conflict prevention organization.

9:34

He lived in Hong Kong, but he commuted

9:36

into Beijing, where he'd stay in a modern

9:38

part of the city near the embassy districts.

9:41

He lived in a futuristic

9:43

compound called San-Ludun Soho, shiny

9:45

black and white skyscrapers designed

9:48

by a Japanese architect. And

9:51

this was in the San-Ludun area, which is

9:53

sort of one of the most modern kind

9:55

of commercial gleaming parts of Beijing. Kovrik

9:58

found that even the layout of the

10:01

city, with embassies in their own special

10:03

districts far from the government headquarters, was

10:05

like a system designed to keep foreigners

10:07

from seeing too much. Half

10:10

the time if you wanted to go see Chinese

10:13

contacts you wanted to talk to, you

10:15

had to fight your way through Beijing

10:17

traffic and cross half the

10:19

city and back. So that in itself, just

10:21

logistics were exhausting in the city. The other

10:23

is that it's a city that, you know,

10:25

where everything seems to be sort of too

10:27

big for a normal human scale, right? If

10:29

you've ever walked into the Ministry of Public

10:31

Security, you stand in front of it and

10:33

you walk into that lobby, that

10:36

very building essentially says to you,

10:39

you are a bug in front of

10:41

the state. The state is

10:44

huge and mighty. You would dream to challenge

10:46

the state, you know, think again. The

10:49

blocks in Beijing from an urban planning perspective

10:52

are too long, right? Because everything is divided

10:54

into these walled off sort of xiaochu. If

10:56

you're trying to get from point A to

10:58

point B walking, you've got very long blocks

11:00

to cross. Covering

11:04

is not the only foreigner to

11:06

feel impossibly small face to face

11:08

with Chinese power. But

11:10

he thought that he still had a role to play, that

11:13

the situation was becoming so worrying

11:15

that anything he could do to

11:17

shed light on China was his

11:19

duty. The main reason that

11:22

I took the job with Crisis Group,

11:24

the timing was ideal for me. When

11:26

I was finishing my diplomatic posting, it

11:29

became existentially clear to me

11:32

that we were heading into a world

11:34

where at

11:36

best we were going to have

11:38

a very intense rivalry between China

11:40

and the US and its allies.

11:43

And at worst we could have

11:45

a major armed conflict in the Pacific

11:48

in my lifetime. And I felt that

11:50

given that there's a limited number of

11:52

people who understand China and particularly also

11:54

understand those kinds of issues and topics,

11:57

I had a responsibility that if I could do

11:59

good work in an area, even if I'm just

12:01

a tiny cog in a giant system, if I

12:04

can do some constructive work to try to prevent

12:06

a major war in the

12:08

Pacific or small things becoming big problems,

12:11

I should do that work. And so the

12:13

crisis group advisor position was an opportunity to

12:15

do that. In

12:17

2018, the year that Michael Kovrig was

12:20

detained, I was just beginning my second

12:22

posting in China. For

12:24

the foreign press corps, even for foreign diplomats,

12:28

working in China often felt like

12:30

taking a calculated risk. For

12:32

all of us working in China at that

12:34

time, if you understood China and you were

12:36

aware of the arbitrariness of the system and

12:39

the law, you always lived with a certain

12:41

perennial fear that something you wrote or said

12:43

or did, or that

12:45

your government did, might be

12:47

misperceived somehow and you hoped you might at

12:50

least be able to get off lightly, maybe

12:52

with getting berated by the MFA or

12:55

something, rather than actually

12:57

having the men in black come and drag you

12:59

away. Kovrig

13:03

was a citizen of Canada, a country

13:05

that for a long time preferred not to

13:07

see the risks or the dark sides of

13:09

the world. Canada

13:12

was an open, trade-focused country that

13:14

wants to be friends with every

13:16

great power, including both China and

13:19

America. But by 2018,

13:22

with Donald Trump in the White House,

13:24

it was getting harder for countries like

13:26

Canada to wish geopolitics away. It was

13:30

becoming a time to choose sides whether

13:32

Canada liked it or not. America

13:35

was asking allies to help it

13:37

push back against what it saw

13:39

as the China threat. And

13:42

China was ready to punish countries

13:44

that lent their support to those

13:46

American efforts. In

13:50

Xi Jinping's China, the authorities are

13:52

less and less tolerant of foreigners

13:54

asking questions. Research that would be

13:56

normal elsewhere can be called spying.

14:00

Michael Kovrig's work involved the normal

14:02

business of diplomacy or journalism, making

14:05

contacts, speaking to scholars, spotting

14:08

business people with first-hand knowledge of what's

14:10

happening out on the ground. It's

14:14

definitely not espionage, it's diplomatic reporting

14:16

pure and simple. I think the

14:18

issue is that the Chinese have

14:20

a selective definition of espionage,

14:23

and if you look at

14:25

their current 2023 counter-espionage law,

14:27

they've essentially criminalized asking nosy

14:30

questions. Kovrig

14:32

is clear about why his work was

14:34

different from spying. Unlike

14:37

diplomats, spies are tasked

14:39

with stealing secrets, information

14:41

they're not supposed to have, and they

14:44

will bribe and coerce and blackmail to

14:46

get what they need. At

14:49

the International Crisis Group, he was trying

14:51

to understand some of the most sensitive

14:54

issues in Chinese foreign policy. Some

14:56

of the main issues I was looking at were

14:58

things like the South China Sea disputes, tensions

15:01

between China and Taiwan. And

15:04

he was also interested in understanding

15:06

China's neighbor North Korea, a

15:09

hermit kingdom and headache for the whole

15:11

region. The main thing that

15:13

I was actually drawn into working on was

15:15

not in fact China, but rather North Korea,

15:18

because at that point in time, over the

15:20

last couple of years, Kim

15:22

Jong-un had been ramping up North

15:25

Korea's missile testing, and

15:27

including nuclear testing, and was

15:29

being increasingly menacing. China's

15:32

border region with North Korea is a

15:34

tightly policed place. Diplomats and

15:36

journalists traveling there often struggle to get

15:38

a sense of what's going on. One

15:41

contact, for many of them, was Michael

15:43

Sparvo, a Canadian entrepreneur who

15:45

ran travel tours into North Korea.

15:49

Kovrig first met Sparvo when he was working

15:51

his secondary role at the embassy as a

15:53

vice consul, looking after the

15:55

welfare of far-flung Canadian citizens. Sparvo

15:58

lived on the Chinese side of the border. side of

16:00

the North Korean border. He liked

16:02

to live there because it was a good place to

16:04

run his tour business and he didn't speak Chinese. The

16:07

point being my initial interest in him

16:09

was simply like, oh we have a Canadian living in

16:11

a part of the country that is

16:13

probably, you know, not the safest place

16:15

to be doing business. Let's

16:19

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16:22

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16:38

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16:41

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when I think about the work of covering China as

17:34

a journalist or researcher, I can see

17:36

in my mind's eye a series of impenetrable

17:38

black boxes, with foreign analysts

17:40

peering at them from the outside.

17:43

There's the black box of China's

17:46

political system. There are other specific mysteries. Who owns

17:48

this big Chinese company? Who really controls

17:50

that technology? And

17:52

then there's China's security

17:54

machine, the blackest

17:57

box of all. By

18:02

the middle of 2018, Trump's trade

18:04

war had stoked tensions with Xi

18:07

Jinping's China. And the

18:09

loudest arguments were centred on a

18:11

particular Chinese technology company, Huawei.

18:15

Some of Canada's allies say China

18:17

could use Huawei's technology to spy

18:19

on the Canadian government, even spy

18:21

on us. Last week,

18:24

the Pentagon banned sales of Huawei phones

18:26

on American military bases around the world,

18:29

and FBI Director Christopher Wray had

18:31

this to say. We're

18:34

deeply concerned about the risks

18:36

of allowing any company

18:38

or entity that is beholden to

18:41

foreign governments that don't share our

18:43

values, provides. Huawei had

18:45

rapidly become the supplier of choice

18:48

to telecoms giants around the world.

18:51

The Trump administration wanted friends

18:53

and allies to stop buying

18:55

technology from Huawei. They

18:58

accuse the company of being controlled by

19:00

the Communist Party, maybe even the

19:02

People's Liberation Army. Chinese

19:06

media retorted that Huawei is a

19:08

private company whose only offence is

19:10

to sell equipment that is better

19:13

and cheaper than the kit made

19:15

by Western rivals. It shows that

19:17

lawmakers are concerned about Chinese companies

19:20

in the US telecom sector. Huawei

19:22

said in a statement that the

19:24

US market presents unique challenges and

19:27

it remains committed to the effort.

19:30

Huawei said that privacy and

19:32

security are always its first

19:34

priorities. Huawei is the most...

19:37

American officials pointed to China's

19:39

national security laws and argued

19:41

that Huawei could be used

19:43

as an arm of Chinese

19:45

intelligence gathering. Huawei

19:47

denied that. When operating in foreign

19:50

markets, it's said that the company

19:52

would never, could never hand over

19:55

foreigners' data to Chinese spy services.

19:58

Huawei insisted that it abaze... local

20:00

laws in each country, and those laws

20:02

would forbid it from spying for China.

20:06

The once publicity-shy company began

20:08

sending out its best engineers

20:10

as corporate lobbyists. The

20:13

company's aim was to make trust into

20:16

a technical engineering problem. Huawei's

20:19

pitch to governments was, look, look

20:21

inside our 5G box. See,

20:23

there's no back door. But

20:26

America was trying to convince allies that this

20:28

was the wrong question. The

20:30

question was a much simpler one. Why

20:32

would you let a company from a country like

20:34

China build something as vital to

20:36

modern life as a 5G network?

20:44

Then the US Department of Justice took a

20:46

crowbar to the black box of Huawei. They

20:50

decided to prosecute Meng Wanzhou, the

20:52

company's CFO, and the daughter of

20:54

its founder. She

20:57

was arrested while changing planes in Vancouver,

21:00

under an extradition treaty that the Americans

21:02

have with Canada. Huawei's

21:05

CFO has been arrested in Canada

21:07

at the request of US authorities.

21:10

Canadian officials say she was arrested on

21:12

Saturday, the same day as China and

21:15

the US signed a temporary trade war

21:17

truce. At the time, I did

21:19

assess that there would be

21:21

consequences because the Chinese tend

21:23

to like retaliation in such

21:25

cases. I didn't expect that they

21:28

would take hostages, and I didn't expect

21:30

they would take me a hostage in

21:32

particular. First of all,

21:34

because the source of the dispute was really with

21:37

the United States, I actually speculated

21:39

that, would they, for example, detain an

21:41

American tech executive or something and thought,

21:43

well, that wouldn't make sense. That's just

21:46

going to chill the business community on

21:48

China. So unfortunately, I

21:50

thought through some of that, but I

21:52

underestimated, I think, their rashness and ruthlessness

21:55

in prosecuting their things. And also, I

21:57

think, I didn't entirely think through adequate

22:00

what China's objectives were in taking

22:02

hostages there. Michael

22:06

Kovrik has thought again and again about

22:08

his fateful decision to fly to

22:10

Beijing just days after Meng

22:13

Wanzhou's arrest in Canada. I

22:15

was in Hong Kong at the time, but I

22:17

had a ticket to Beijing in a few days.

22:19

So again, if you want to talk about sort

22:21

of how human mind works, right? We

22:23

tend to keep going with the default of what

22:26

we're doing unless something pushes us to change it.

22:28

I think if I hadn't had a ticket booked,

22:30

I might have waited. Meng

22:32

Wanzhou is seen as tech royalty in China. Netizens

22:35

sometimes call her Huawei

22:37

Zhang Gongju, the princess of

22:39

Huawei. Meng was

22:41

one of Huawei's public faces around the world.

22:46

Here she is giving a presentation in

22:48

Singapore a couple of months before her

22:50

arrest. I mentioned

22:52

idealism and

22:54

practicality. Both

22:56

are important in R&D

22:59

at Huawei. We

23:01

look up at the stats and

23:03

look into the future. We

23:06

also keep our feet on the

23:08

ground and do what

23:10

we can with what is possible

23:12

today. American

23:14

prosecutors called Meng something more

23:17

sinister, an agent

23:19

of China's geopolitical influence.

23:23

Specifically, they accused her

23:25

of misleading a bank about

23:27

Huawei's business dealings with Iran. Huawei

23:30

said it was unaware of any

23:32

wrongdoing by Meng Wanzhou. US

23:35

prosecutors say Meng used a shell company

23:37

for Huawei's dealings with Iran, misleading

23:40

banks into approving millions of dollars

23:42

in transactions that violated sanctions. For

23:45

the Trump administration, this prosecution

23:47

was a chance to shine a harsh

23:50

light on Huawei and prove

23:52

to the world that Chinese tech companies

23:54

cannot be trusted. Learning

23:58

that Meng Wanzhou would be on Canadian