D ELI GHT S | BOOKS
On hostage diplomacy and the cold war with China
Christina Spencer
The Two Michaels: Innocent Canadian Captives and High Stakes Espionage in the U.S.-China Cyber War Mike Blanchfield and Fen Osler Hampson Sutherland House, November 2021 $9.99 Kindle $24.70 paperback 300 pages For more than 1,000 days, two Canadians named Michael captured the attention and sympathy of the nation. Hostages of the Chinese government, they were imprisoned under harsh conditions, cut off from family and friends and subject to secret trials on trumped-up charges. The Two Michaels is the first book to emerge about their experiences and the first to take a stab at placing their story into a wider geopolitical context. That context continues to shift as the United States and China trade jabs over Taiwan, the Uyghurs and even the Beijing Winter Olympics. Meanwhile, several individuals, some Canadian and some from other countries, continue to be held as part of China’s policy of international blackmail and intimidation. But, to the specific cases of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig: As anyone who follows the headlines knows, the two were arrested in China within days of each other in late 2018 after Canada, acting on an extradition request from the United States, detained Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese citizen, at the Vancouver Airport. The Americans believed Huawei was flouting U.S. trade sanctions against Iran through a subsidiary company. Much of what happened to Meng after her arrest is on the public record; after all, in Canada, court proceedings are mostly open, legal documents are available and journalists are allowed to report — the opposite of what occurs in China. Ac56
The Two Michaels is the first book to be published on the arrests of two Canadians as retaliation for Canada acting on an extradition treaty with the U.S. when it detained Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou.
cordingly, the authors recount meticulous details of her extradition hearing and her life on bail in Vancouver as proceedings dragged on. Much more challenging was trying to describe the experiences of the Michaels under Beijing’s closed system since the authors didn’t have access to them. Unable to offer a deep dive into the daily regimen of these two prisoners, the authors instead serve up a sense of the personalities of
these men based on their pre-incarceration lives. We learn, for instance, that Kovrig, whose family is of Hungarian background, fronted a punk band in Hungary called Bankrupt in his early days. He taught English there, worked as a journalist, then became a Canadian diplomat and served in Beijing, Hong Kong, at Canada’s UN mission in New York and in Afghanistan. He speaks fluent Mandarin. WINTER-SPRING 2022 | JAN-JUNE
