China summons American envoy over Huawei CFO’s arrest in Canada
Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver at the request of American law enforcement authorities.
Canada recently arrested the chief financial officer of China’s Huawei Technologies, who faces extradition to the United States on suspicion because U.S. trade sanctions against Iran.
Meng Wanzhou, who is also the deputy chair of Huawei’s board and the daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested on Saturday in Vancouver at the request of American law enforcement authorities.
“She is sought for extradition by the United States, and a bail hearing has been set for Friday,” Justice Department spokesman Ian McLeod said in a statement to The Globe and Mail on Wednesday. “As there is a publication ban in effect, we cannot provide any further detail at this time. The ban was sought by Ms. Meng.”
According to Canadian officials, she may have been operating from Canada to avoid the US embargo on Iran. Now, the American envoy has been summoned to protest the arrest.
China’s Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng has summoned the U.S. Ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, in a protest over the arrest of Huawei Technologies Co. Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, and said it will take “further action” if needed.
…The minister said U.S. actions have violated the “legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens and are extremely bad in nature,” according to a posting on the ministry website. “China will take further action based on the U.S. actions.”
The move comes after a week in which both China and the U.S. seemed to struggle with how to react to an arrest with potentially broad reverberations. The two nations are, at the same time, trying to ratchet back a damaging trade dispute.
However, there may be less to the drama then immediately meets the eyes.
…[A]t a high-level conference on Sunday at Tsinghua University in Beijing that included four Nobel laureates in economics from the United States, a senior adviser to the Chinese leadership opened his remarks by praising the two countries’ broader economic relationship and avoiding any mention of the arrest.
“The economies of China and the United States are integrated,” said the adviser, Ma Jianting, a vice president of the Development Research Council, the policy advisory unit of China’s cabinet. “There is no parting of the ways.”
Mr. Ma’s remarks were the latest of many signs that the Chinese government was trying to compartmentalize the Huawei issue, while still taking an assertive enough stance to satisfy nationalistic anger in China.
Like the missiles over Syria, Meng’s arrest and potential extradition may also be designed to send a message to China. The Trump administration intends to put America first despite a volatile stock market and a Democratic House of Representatives.
In fact, it looks like the “trade talks” are on track.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Sunday insisted that U.S.-China trade talks are moving in a “positive” direction, despite mixed signals from top Trump administration officials and the arrest of the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei.
“We are on track,” Kudlow said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked about the stock market’s 1,100 point drop over the course of last week, pointing to “promising” statements from Beijing’s commerce department and government agencies.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
IMO- China has no power in this equation.
Much like the tech suppliers in India (China)- where else can I over pay @ 22 bucks an hour to get a worker who doesn’t know how to code and wants more money a year after I pay them to learn how to (barely) code on my contract?
oh- and Satya and the Silicon Valley slave market whine because they can’t find engineers in the US… well you’ve established the going rate to be less than a newbie plumber’s assistant (with 0 college)- so super freaking genius’s- maybe use your noggin to do the math on why we aren’t producing more engineers.
IMO- Trump ought to be punching these countries in tech market. What is happening to the future of US labor in tech is an abomination and also a reflection of how little innovation is happening.
Why would there be any innovation in the job market when most of the US government is corrupt, and those players either being leftists, or working with leftists (Flake, etc.) to subjugate the American population into government dependency?
The majority of our government administrators and elected officials have contempt for us. That is a fact.
On the high level, it is the swamp. On a lower level: try going down to your local post office to resolve a problem with our mail. (At least the Seinfeld Soup Nazi owned his own business.)
Oh, you remind me of the ineffective fun I had in Seattle, post Web 1.0, where “outsource to Asia” was the impervious “solution” to accelerate development, cost-control existing products, and fix start-up financials.
“Outsource to India” was the unkillable fad of the moment. Larry “LPoD” Ellison may have been incorrect when he named computing the only industry more driven by fads than womens’ fashion. (Oh, Larry. So woke.) Start-ups are at least as driven; perhaps more faddish than the other two.
“Great, paying nothing for what?”, said I.
In the event paying for “Developers, developers, developers!” per the famoun Monkey-Boy video. See, you’re doing stuff. Look at all those invoices you are paying. But “developers” producing what? What do you *get?*
Spread sourcing for results has always been driven by *finding people who can do the work*, not finding crappy commodities on the cheap. In computing for 40-50 years; in industrial economies for 100-150 years; in human history for at least 3,000 years.
There is a also a strong correlation with the lack of innovation and the social justice craze. The obsession with gender and race/color, sexual orientation is absurd.
I don’t understand how the US can pass criminal laws that apply to two separate nations conducting business outside the US. I can see sanctions affecting the US relationships between these two separate nations diplomatically (including war), but not criminally.
How is that the US has the power to legislate and ajudicate international criminal law? Yeah, yeah, there are international courts that we ignore regularly and there are international laws that apply only to nations that agree to abide by these laws, but that’s not within the purview of the USA.
We have agreements with Canada and other countries likely through NATO to cooperate on legally sanctions. If you are wanted by the US and you set foot in a allied country you will be arrested and brought to the US. I expect the woman will not be in custody long and she will be treated well.
But, how can the US apply US law to a citizen of another country that commits the “offense” outside the US? How does the US claim jurisdiction? And what would Trump have to say if Americans were arrested in Saudi Arabia for not praying five times a day in Baghdad?
I looked it up, for you as well as for myself. There are two answers.
A BBC report said that the woman purportedly lied to “US bankers”. HSBC has been mentioned, which is a “British” bank, but that’s where the holding company is based. The legal entity concerned would therefore be HSBC Bank USA.
Thus, the alleged conspiracy is to fool at least one “American” bank into violating US sanctions. The time frame, 2009-2014, suggests that these were also UN sanctions, but the US’ implementation of those sanctions, and the violation taking place via “American” banks, makes it the US’ problem.
I half-rewrote that, but I meant a) US soil/ legal entity connection, b) the UN angle (which I cannot confirm for certain) because back in 2014 those sanctions were still up.
Debeer’s execs will be arrested if they ever set foot on US soil.
I am reminded of a software project of ours back in the late 90s. Leadership gave it to the minority-owned low bidder, contract drawn, a year goes by and… the chunk of garbage they delivered could not run five minutes, scrambled data, and only produced poor excuses.
Leadership *yanked* it away from the company, sent it out for bids again with first bidder stricken. Second minority-owned company won the bid, signed the contract… and promptly hired every single programmer from the first company, which had folded up like a paper tent. And yes, the owner was a relative. Imagine that. End result, double the money spent, double the time, massive cuts in the features to make it work, and the next software package to replace it was done in-house. That one was done *right* and the support personnel knew exactly how to troubleshoot it because many of them were on the programming team.
Hmmm. This reminds me of the website fiasco with Obamacare. Wasn’t the company minority owned AND a crony of the Obamas?
The lady just offered her husband and children as bail.
I worked in Seattle at a law firm, one of whose clients was Microsoft.
I got first hand experience about what you are saying. The outsourcing was pretty awful. Non-English speakers were trying to deal with complicated tasks involving very precise language and they had no idea what they were doing. I spent most of my time correcting the outsourced material. They might have worked with computers and were cheap but that was the mechanical stuff — the interfnal material that was important they screwed up. It was like hiring temps on big projects for which they had no expertise. I finally convinced my supervisor that it was easier to give me overtime than waste all my time correcting things that were wrong.