A Bid for Hostage Diplomacy With China Backfires in Canada

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July 10, 2020, 6:00 PM EDT

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Justin Trudeau attends a news conference in Ottawa on July 8. Photographer: David Kawai/Bloomberg

The letter circulated by Huawei Technologies Co. was blunt. Canada was becoming dangerously entangled in the diplomatic feud between Washington and Beijing, it said, and there was only one answer: for Justin Trudeau’s government to free the state-championed tech giant’s chief financial officer and let her go back to China.

It sounds like a warning from the Chinese government. In fact, the June 23 letter to the prime minister was signed by a who’s who’s of 19 prominent Canadians -- among them a retired Supreme Court justice, a former attorney-general and several ex-cabinet ministers and ambassadors. Within 24 hours of it making headlines in Canada, Huawei executives were sharing the four-page note with journalists abroad.