Either China is doing this so they can have something to retreat on that seems gracious and careful (i.e., it's a complete ploy) or they're completely misreading Canadian sentiment. Canadians tend to give and give and bend and bend, but it really comes to it they snap in a way that I don't think the Chinese understand.

We have way more leverage over China than they have over us. We sell them commodities. They sell us electronics. You know what's the one good thing about commodity sales? Fungibility. If we start banning Chinese phones we'll buy American ones come in instead. If they ban Canadian grain it will be less efficient, but the world will shift around and that grain will be sold to someone. If they ban our wood, it will be less efficient, but we can make our own furniture or sell wood to Europe to replace the wood China is buying from elsewhere.

And if push every really came to shove there is a lot of Chinese owned property in Canada. Foreign ownership taxes can go way, way up.

It's a complete misread of the situation by them. We have extradition treaties with the USA. Our society runs via a rule of law. They're going to turn the entire Canadian business and political community against them if they keep this up. Take it up with the Americans for fucks sake. Even Maxime Bernier has walked back his pledge for a Chinese-Canadian trade agreement.

>If we start banning Chinese phones we'll buy American ones come in instead.

Huh? America doesn't make any phones, and worse, simply does not even have the technology to make phones if they wanted to. America does not have the technology needed to make the screens for them, most notably: the screen technology is all in Asia.

Isn't a good portion of screen technology in Sourth Korea though, which is more of a US ally than a Chinese one?

Yes. Samsung and LG are the top screen manufacturers.

I'm not unaware that iPhones are physically constructed in China. If we had tariffs on Chinese phones only a small portion of the tariff would fall on the overall cost of an iPhone.

It doesn't have the technology or the manufacturing capability?

Neither. The technology is made in China or Korea, and owned by the Koreans. We couldn't build modern smartphone screens in the US without doing serious industrial espionage on our own ally, and even then setting up the manufacturing capability would cost billions, if we could get it working and not have a problem like the "capacitor plague" that happened when the Chinese tried stealing Japanese capacitor formulae back in the late 90s or early 2000s and didn't quite get it right.

Apple owns the patents for it's phones. Right? They are just manufactured by foxconn (Taiwanese).

Samsung is a Korean company.

This almost certainly has nothing to do with changing Canadian behavior, it's about domestic politics. Canada/USA kicked one of ours, so we're going to kick 20 of theirs. They need to be seen to be doing it. The fact that it won't work and is counterproductive doesn't matter.

> This almost certainly has nothing to do with changing Canadian behavior, it's about domestic politics. Canada/USA kicked one of ours, so we're going to kick 20 of theirs. They need to be seen to be doing it. The fact that it won't work and is counterproductive doesn't matter.

Is CCTV or other state-run outlets making a big deal about this death sentence and the other Canadian arrests? Is it portraying them as retaliation?

It doesn't have to.

Did anyone need to tell anyone on HN that it was retaliation?

I've been saying this since they first arrested the Huawei lady, everyone is an outlaw right now. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of laws on the books in most nations. (Especially China and the US.) There is just no way that a regular person with no resources can be certain that he or she is not in violation of one of them. (In fact, it's a virtual certainty that we all are in violation of some law.) So we can be legally arrested for the violation of laws we were likely unaware of at any time. (Not that the subject of the article was unaware of the criminal nature of his actions.)

Point being, if you are not a bigshot with a lot of clout, I would strongly urge you to urgently consider business models that allow you to operate at a distance from Asia. You don't want to be the pathetic slob of a patsy sitting in an Asian prison for 15 years because China and the US want to have some stupid argument to see who has the biggest breasts. It's just not worth it.

(BTW, the same goes for the average Chinese person by the way. I'd strongly urge you to do business at a distance from North America. There's no since in spending the rest of your youth learning street slang in an American prison.)

> Take it up with the Americans for fucks sake.

Look I am no big fan of the Chinese political engine, but maybe Canada overstepped. The arrest of the CFO can be seen as highly political motivated, and now China is showing Canada that it too can do the same thing and arrest citizens of other countries (maybe even on flimsy grounds) or in this case use it's legal system to pressure and manipulate international relationships.

Canada got stuck in the middle (as many countries do when they do the bidding of the US) and have now got a slap on the wrist.

Let me try to make this as clear as I can:

Canada operates on the rule of law.

Rule of law.

Rule of law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law

When the fucking Queen of England had a minor medical issue and was bumped in priority in the hospital she was in it was fucking news with journalists asking how this list was overseen. Our own head of state made the news because she got bumped in our hospitals.

When the Americans do a request like this it doesn't go through our political arm. It goes through our civil service and our courts. We don't have random people with the random power to bend the law. We set law and judges enforce it. Some laws we have are very flexible, like the ones we have for CSIS, etc. But we don't politick extradition.

Are you sure you're not being too trusting to your country? Are you 100% sure nothing happens "behind the scenes"?

>If we start banning Chinese phones we'll buy American ones come in instead.

Which American phones are these? The iPhone isn't made in the US, it's made by Foxconn.

Foxconn is Taiwanese not Chinese. Most of their manufacturing is in China so I'm not sure how much that distinction matters in this scenario but I thought it helpful to clarify.

Note that, as far as China is concerned, Taiwan is a part of China. So from their perspective that is even less of a useful distiction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy

It's a very useful distinction because de facto Taiwan is not part of China.

tell that to a Taiwanese. They are not going to like you

Most of the IP/software and profit in an iPhone comes from and goes to a US company. Most of the components in an iPhone aren’t from China (nor the USA). Yes, it is assembled in China, but it isn’t accurate to say it is a Chinese product.

There's not much you can do with the IP if China stops being willing to make the product for you. (Unless the IP is so far ahead of the competition you can sell it, but Chinese phone manufacturers are making phones that are very competitive with iPhones.)

Even the Chinese phone manufacturers rely on American software (Android), even if Google gives that away.

If China refused to assemble iPhones for Apple, that assembly could easily be shifted somewhere else: the components are mostly not from China and even the machinery used to assemble the iPhones is mostly German. Apple/Foxconn do it in China because it is the best deal ATM, and shift iPhone assembly around as needed easily (eg iPhones are assembled in Brazil, and will be in India to get around tariffs).

Nokia duh...

R&D + production done by Foxconn

HMD it's just sales department slapping Nokia sticker on Foxconn phones

I’ve always had a pleasant experience returning home. I travel 200 days in a year and never have I had a bad experience during US Immigration. In fact, I look forward to “Welcome home” from an officer although now it’s more expedited with the automated passport control and they hardly take more than 20 seconds to let you go.

I am curious of your bad experience, can you tell us more?

Edit: I do not look like a typical US Citizen.

Edit: Tangentially, I have also had great experience with American police. I’ve been pulled over a few times and the officers always have a calm demeanor with utmost level of professionalism. The narrative of US authorities mishaving happens in headline cases, not to vast number of people.

Weird. I have never had a pleasant experience with US customs. They are usually not unpleasant either, but they’re never friendly or even more than vaguely polite.

(I say “usually” because my wife was once told off quite rudely when she went through the visitors line as a permanent resident, because she wanted to help and translate for visiting family members she was with.)

The worst part of the experience is knowing they will not hesitate to fuck me over if they decide they want to, and I have little recourse. They can’t keep me out of the country, but they can screw me up for hours or days if they want. They can keep my wife out of the country arbitrarily, and the only fix there would be a lengthy and expensive legal process with no guarantee of success.

It’s minor compared to the hypothetical example of being imprisoned or executed on false drug charges, but my point isn’t that US immigration isn’t equivalently bad, but that I felt and experienced no menace whatsoever from Chinese law enforcement.

I've been through many times as white British person (both as a visitor and on various visas) and have never had a bad experience. I'm not denying that people do have bad experiences. But I find it kind of hard to believe that as a US citizen, you've never once had an experience of re-entering the country that didn't involve the customs agent asking you a couple of simple questions and then sending you on your way.

I'm a US citizen living abroad, and when I flew into Newark once, an agent turned me away because I could not give him an address for where I was staying, since my mother had just moved. I believe his words were "no, no, no, I can't deal with this right now" and he yelled at me when I tried to explain. There was literally nowhere else for me to go.

After walking around flustered, I decided to try another kiosk and that guy let me through. That's how stupid and arbitrary the process can be for an arriving citizen.

Yikes. Just FYI in case it’s useful in the future, as a US citizen you have an absolute right to enter the country. They cannot keep you out, period. They can cause you a great deal of trouble first, but they can’t outright turn you away. Hopefully you never have occasion to use this knowledge!

Customs agents everywhere freak out if you don't have $INFORMATION to hand. That's not something unique to the USA. If you travel a lot, you learn to have this sort of information readily available whenever you cross a border.

That is exactly what the experience is most of the time. It’s unpleasant because they’re not nice and they have way too much power, but it’s not a big deal. Again, my point is not that it’s completely awful, but rather that this minor unpleasantness still manages to be the worst thing on these trips.

I guess I don't understand what level of "niceness" you're expecting. Most of the time they've been friendly and polite (to me). Given that they're humans doing a basically crappy job, I don't expect any more than that.

Friendly and polite would be nice. I don’t think I’ve ever had that from US immigration, although it’s the norm elsewhere.

I guess there's not much point in just trading anecdotes, but that's really not my experience. I've generally found US customs to be friendlier than British customs, for example (and I'm British).

I get more polite service from minimum wage workers at Burger King or a regional grocery chain.

Since they have to let US citizens in, you likely don’t have to answer questions unrelated to the goods you’re bringing back.

But the pressure is obviously there to answer anyway.

They have to let US citizens in, but they can detain you for a reasonable amount of time while they investigate you, which could be days. They also don’t have to let your stuff in. If you don’t answer their questions, you are very likely to get into the country late and without your possessions, so only do this as a last resort.

(This is in contrast to interacting with police within the country, where they can’t search your stuff against your will or hold you without probable cause, and not answering questions is a good default.)

Curious...is your wife from a country that is not on good relations with USA? Have you traveled to the likes of Iran, Syria etc? Do you think your name has the equivalent of an asterik next to it?

They have so many people to process that unless you "piss them off" (as judged by them) and you are a US citizen with all docs in order they don't usually pick on people.

She is from China, hence all of my trips there. I don’t think I set off any red flags. I know they don’t usually pick on people, and haven’t picked on me or my family aside from that one incident, but the odds of being picked on by USCIS are way higher than the odds of being picked on by Chinese police as a foreign tourist.

I got searched a lot by customs in Seattle on my trips from Beijing when I started working there. I think they were looking for pirated DVDs or something; joke was on them since my bag was always mostly empty coming to the USA (I would fill it up coming back since shopping in the states was much cheaper than in China). They weren’t rude though, I found it just annoying to be searched.

Chinese police...well, I mean, there is crap you have to put up with as a foreigner. Finding the right amount of paper work to register at the local PSB (and sometimes needing to drag your landlord along), and having to re-register after a foreign trip. Then the random checks when they come to your apartment to check your paper work... Chinese police aren’t bad by any means, but if you are a foreigner living in China, there will be some friction.

Maybe it is different when you don't _look_ like you're a US citizen.

I look very close to an Arab person than I look like a typical US Citizen. My friends joke if I should get rid of my facial hair for the expediency of immigration. I’ve always been treated well and this goes for vast number of Americans and Foreigners that enter US.

Arab people look very close to "white" people, and even more so these days since almost all American men have decided to wear giant, fuzzy beards.

How does a US citizen _look_? Last I checked we were an incredibly diverse nation.

Well, I meant what they think a US citizen would look like. For example, if you look Asian, you might still be a US citizen but more likely they'd treat you differently.

I'm saying this as someone who is married to a Mexican and crosses the US border by car. In general the experiences have been good by the way - just not all the time.

I'm just saying that it could be influenced by the way you look.

(not big in American ethnicity but)

I think his point is that "looking like a US citizen" is basically either being European, native American or African American. Which I guess is kind of like everyone except for people who look like Asian, South American or from the Middle East.

You are uniquely lucky person and probably by other responses you can see how rare is experience like yours. While I never had huge problems on the border, it is always unpleasant experience and what they can do to you is so overproportional to things you can be seen at fault.

My mother in law sneaked an orange in our suitcase, for the kids. I was charged $150 or $300(not sure anymore) for it and put on some list.

The best. experience is when you can pass without any interaction. Rarely I see it as welcome home, even though I am eager go and happy to be, home.

God help you if you are from Syria, Iran or any other country like that. Even Israelis because they 'look arab' often have issues.

Right, they’re usually not outright bad, but they’re certainly not welcoming. To put it in perspective, I’d much rather go to the DMV than go through American immigration controls, and the DMV workers are way nicer.

I would rather go through American immigration controls than to wait for anything at ICBC (a state owned bank in China). There goes an entire afternoon of pure misery.

> Random anecdote: I just got back to the US from several weeks in China.

I'm sure most people will be fine visiting China, but personally I like rule-of-law :)

No justice system is perfect. Coming from Denmark, I'm not impressed by the US justice system. But if you hire a lawyer your odds of a fair trial is decent.

But in China there is no assumption of regularity, or assumption of good faith. If someone powerful doesn't like you or wants to send a message -- then I guess you can take solace in the fact that your organs might not go to waste.

I totally see where you’re coming from and I have no problem with such a decision. It’s not the decision I make, but I wouldn’t try to argue that you’re wrong.

My main point isn’t that everyone should go to China worry-free, but rather that a years-old drug conviction being bumped up from a long prison sentence to a death sentence isn’t going to make much difference to the decision. People like you probably wouldn’t go either way, and people like me aren’t going to change their minds because of it.

You don't think there is a big difference between 15 years in prison and the death penalty? You still have a lot of time left in life after 15 years so it is major difference.

Not if you're quite old. Which I is the only way I find what he said to be logical.

Perhaps as somebody who travels in China, apologizing for China in this way makes him feel safer?

Pointing out that this case does not influence a rational evaluation of the risk/reward of travel to China is hardly “apologizing for China.”

Don't forget the context: I'm brushing it off in terms of its impact on the decision of whether to travel to a particular country.

Or go ahead and forget the context so you can make me sound worse, seems to be your thing.

Not really. In terms of “this has completely ruined my life,” 15 years in a Chinese prison would rate about 9.8 out of 10 for me, while death is 10 out of 10. In terms of balancing the benefits of travel versus the risk of law enforcement misconduct, that additional 0.2 out of 10 makes no noticeable difference.

That seems a little glib. They're not going to scoop out your brain in prison and you have _a_ future, even if it's not the one you were planning for.

Invert it: if faced with the death penalty, how much effort would you expend to get it commuted to 15 years?

I don’t think the inversion is a useful way to look at it.

Here’s the right way to look at it: what do you consider to be the acceptable odds of being imprisoned for 15 years while traveling to a foreign country? And what are the acceptable odds for being killed?

I don’t have a concrete number for either one, but they wouldn’t be much different.

Consider also that your odds of dying in a traffic accident are much higher than your odds of being executed on false pretenses by the state in most places (especially China, where they’ve only recently decided that wearing seat belts is something you should actually do, and the annual per-vehicle fatality rate is almost 10x that of the US), so the added risk from executions is hard to even detect.

I'm not rational enough to really get behind your "right way" to look at it - it's a bit too homo economicus for me!

Sure, the acceptable odds for both are similar and very low, but the outcomes are vastly different. Once my dice roll has bought me into contact either one of those possibilities, I am passionately invested in making sure it's 15 years in prison.

(Edit: such thinking is of course why plea bargains work and are used so often by prosecutors in the US.)

Yes, once you’re looking at one of those two possibilities, you really want the prison. But before that point, almost your entire focus is going to be on not getting either one.

My point isn’t that they’re basically the same in all aspects, it’s that they’re basically the same in terms of their input to the decision of whether to travel to a given place.

That is a very uncommon opinion.

Is it really? It seems pretty widely accepted that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime, for example, which indicates that people (well, potential criminals, anyway) don’t see it as substantially worse than a lengthy prison term.

It's not about which is worse either though. The implicit calculation is: If I get caught, will the punishment deter me.

But (approximately) nobody commits a crime on the assumption they will get caught, so it pretty much doesn't matter what the punishment is. The way to move the needle is to change the assumption about getting caught. The closer that tends towards guaranteed, the less chance people will even make above calculation in the first place.

Yes, exactly. And my thinking for travel is much the same. I’m not traveling on the assumption that I will be falsely convicted of a crime while I’m there. The way to move the needle on my decision to travel is to change the assumption about being falsely convicted, not what will happen to me if I am. Thus, a man already in prison for years suddenly being sentenced to death doesn’t change my travel plans at all.

Or that risk evaluation doesn't generally play a big part in decisionmaking that leads to crimes punishable by death.

It's a fascinating point that the pro death penalty crowd universally ignores.

US violent crime has plunged over the last 40 years, and the murder rate has been chopped in half since 1980, all the while death sentences have declined to ~45-50 year lows (there has been roughly a 90% reduction in new death sentences since 1999). The dramatic plunge in new death sentences over two decades hasn't coincided with any uptick in the murder rate or violent crime.

The people who commit heinous crimes usually have psychological problems that cause them to have very low impulse control. They don't think their actions through very well, which is why they're in their position instead of some better and more legal lifestyle/career. So harsher punishments really don't deter them; they don't expect to get caught and aren't thinking about that when they commit the crime.

There's a theory that violent crime has plunged over the last 40 years because of leaded gasoline being phased out: the lead was in the air and environment and giving everyone low-level lead poisoning.

He was a convicted drug dealer, that's little comfort when other people like the random teacher [0] and entrepreneur [1] they arrested were not.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-sarah-mciver-detained...

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-officials-meet-wit...

According to your link, the teacher was employed illegally. It's common for students and other people without work permits to be offered positions as English teachers where the only requirement is being born in North America. The employers usually gloss over the illegality or claim that the laws are not enforced. That's been true in the past, but as that teacher had to learn, it can change anytime.

So my generalized advice is to comply with the law instead of relying on lack of enforcement. They can still get you for "national security" reasons, but it's much less likely if you aren't a big fish.

>So my generalized advice is to comply with the law

In a country where millions of people are held in reeducation camps for practicing the wrong religion, the "law" as written is a joke.

From friends living their, it's impossible to actually strictly follow what's on the books, particularly for foreigners. You have to know the current expectations, what's being enforced by the local government etc...

What matters isn't what's written, it's what is currently being practiced.

> From friends living their, it's impossible to actually strictly follow what's on the books, particularly for foreigners.

Could you give an example of laws that your friends found impossible to follow? If they don't speak Chinese, that would explain it, because obviously you first need to understand what the law says before you can comply.

That's not the case.

Check https://www.chinalawblog.com/ for some examples if you want to.

Easy ones are:

You can be held criminally liable for mistakes your employer makes, since you have no control over and likely no knowledge of what "illegal" actions your employer might be taking, there is no way to comply with the law.

If you sell something to a Chinese company and they decide that they aren't satisfied with your product (maybe they just don't want to pay), you can be charged with a crime for selling "defective" products.

Is there any country where it is not somewhat common for foreigners to work there illegally without being punished, and also for those foreign workers to occasionally get caught and deported for it?

That's not my point. The point is that in a country like China following the law as written is not a defense, and it's likely not even possible.

Your best bet is to keep your head down and follow common practices.

Is your point that her failure to comply with work visa rules was actually the right thing to do, and thus her punishment for it is unfair?

Chinese work visa rules contain requirements like you must do P and you can’t do P. Compliance is impossible given the contradiction. Instead, you need to go with the flow like everyone else, China is not a rule of law country, they will just use the law on you if they don’t like you (and given the way the laws are written, you are necessarily breaking something).

It is also important to read sources like https://www.chinalawblog.com if you want to survive in China long term.

I can’t find a definitive answer of exactly what she was accused of, but it sounds like she just didn’t have a work permit at all. I doubt there’s a requirement to not have a permit to work.

I don't know the specifics of this case either, but people are jailed and deported regularly for mistakes made by their employer that they didn't and couldn't have known about.

However, I was never talking about this case in particular. I was talking about the assumption that if you just follow the law as written you'll be fine.

You have no individual rights while in China, and the law is intentionally vague and arbitrarily enforced. This isn't an accident--the system is designed so that anyone can be prosecuted if the government decides it's necessary. If you keep your head down and do what everyone else is doing, statistically you'll probably be fine. However, as a foreigner living in China, whether you break the law isn't up to you.

If a company decides they didn't like the product or service you provide and accuses you of selling defective goods, you can be criminally charged and convicted. If a Chinese citizen overcharges you and you don't want to pay, you can be criminally charged and convicted.

Read the China law blog. If you are an English teacher, you might think you have a proper work permit when your employer has done something really dodgy. They do that because they can’t hire foreign teachers properly, and everyone was just expected to break the rules in the past.

For high paid high tech workers this isn’t much of a problem, we got proper work permits, I think.

I wouldn't be surprised if her employer tricked her into thinking she had the proper permit, as you suggest. I don't see how that matters. I'm sure that sort of thing happens all over the place. The sort of people who would hire workers illegally are also the sort of people who would lie to them and say it's all legal.

Work without authorization, get caught, get arrested and deported. Happens every day in countries all over the world. I don't see anything even remotely remarkable about this case.

It happens enough in China that it’s a common occurrence. Enforcement of Chinese law makes the employee culpable, not the employer, so the employers see no reason to stop doing that to each new crop of naive foreigners.

So, this one incident isn’t unusual or remarkable and certainly isn’t a reason to avoid tourism in the country.

Tourists won’t have many problems in China (beyond air pollution of course); rule of law wouldn’t be much of an issue to them, you aren’t really living there. Workers on the other hand.....

> So my generalized advice is to comply with the law instead of relying on lack of enforcement.

How many years should I spend studying Chinese law before I can be sufficiently sure I'm complying with it?

> They can still get you for "national security" reasons, but it's much less likely if you aren't a big fish.

Isn't the point of this discussion that people who aren't otherwise big fish are being used as political pawns due to their nationality?

That random teacher had some visa problem and was quickly deported. That’s totally normal in most countries.

The entrepreneur is a high profile person playing a very political game with business in North Korea. It does sound like his arrest was unjust, but it doesn’t indicate anything for regular folks like me. His story just reinforces my policy of “stay the fuck away from North Korea.”

>Suddenly changing his sentence to death is rather suspicious, but at least for me it doesn’t make a huge difference compared to a 15-year sentence.

I'm guessing going from 15 years to death sentence is probably a big difference to him.

There are precedents that drug trafficker got death sentences, so there’s nothing surprising at all. I guess he got 15 years sentence originally probably because the government didn’t want to hurt their relationship with Canada at their time. Many Chinese find that sentence improper. Chinese laws and the laws in many Asian country regarding drugs are much stricter than those in US

This is something that has really irked me the past couple years. I feel safer entering other countries than I do coming back to the U.S.

It feels like you’re entering a prison camp going through immigration. Everyone is screened by security before getting on a plane yet passport control officers are wearing swat team bullet proof vests and open-carry guns while checking your passport.

>Suddenly changing his sentence to death is rather suspicious, but at least for me it doesn’t make a huge difference compared to a 15-year sentence.

There's a huge difference, from a human rights stand point for non-violent crimes there is a very noticeable difference.

Of course. But we’re talking about the potential impact on tourism here.

> ... at least for me it doesn’t make a huge difference compared to a 15-year sentence.

There isn't a huge difference between a death sentence versus 15 years in prison? You're kidding right?

Whether the person is in fact guilty or innocent, there is a significant difference between the two sentences, literally the difference between life or death. One irrevocably extinguishes the person's life - there is no going back. The other is a very long incarceration, cutting them off from society for that time, and offering at best a chance for correction.

The context of this statement is in deciding whether or not to travel to China. I am having a very hard time coming up with a scenario where the possibility of a 15-year prison sentence has me deciding to go, but the possibility of execution makes me decide to stay home.