At this point I think I'm too afraid to ever go to China. You can't get justice there, and you can be swept up into some stupid diplomatic spat.
Don't they realize how short-sighted this is? This is incredibly harmful to tourism.
Don't they realize how short-sighted this is? This is incredibly harmful to tourism.
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.
Random anecdote: I just got back to the US from several weeks in China. By far the most uncomfortable and worrying law-enforcement interaction of the trip was going through US immigration control on the way back.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
But the pressure is obviously there to answer anyway.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Invert it: if faced with the death penalty, how much effort would you expend to get it commuted to 15 years?
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.
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.)
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.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-sarah-mciver-detained...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-officials-meet-wit...
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.”
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.
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.
Your best bet is to keep your head down and follow common practices.
It is also important to read sources like https://www.chinalawblog.com if you want to survive in China long term.
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.
For high paid high tech workers this isn’t much of a problem, we got proper work permits, I think.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.)
Which American phones are these? The iPhone isn't made in the US, it's made by Foxconn.
HMD it's just sales department slapping Nokia sticker on Foxconn phones
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).
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.
Samsung is a Korean company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a huge difference, from a human rights stand point for non-violent crimes there is a very noticeable difference.
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.
I'm guessing going from 15 years to death sentence is probably a big difference to him.
To be fair, he did attempt to smuggle "methamphetamines to Australia in pellets stuffed inside tires".
It's not like they picked some random foreigner and accused him of something.
If the business people start avoiding China, there impact on it's already slowing economy would be devastating.
Thirteen Canadians have been detained in China since Huawei executive’s arrest, says Ottawa https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-thirteen-ca...
China says detained Canadian Michael Kovrig doesn't have diplomatic immunity https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/china-says-detained-canadian-m...
You shouldn't be going to a country where they don't even respect diplomatic immunity
Plus, if I am not mistaken Michael Kovrig is not a diplomat so saying that china does not respect diplomatic immunity seems baseless.
"A “diplomatic agent” is the head of the mission or a member of the diplomatic staff of the mission;"
"1.A diplomatic agent shall enjoy immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the receiving State. He shall also enjoy immunity from its civil and administrative jurisdiction, except in the case of:"...
Michael Kovrig was not part of a diplomatic mission to China by Canada. Therefore he is not a diplomatic agent.
This is a clear cut case. Ex-diplomats with private passports are not entitled to diplomatic immunity.
There's people who won't travel to the US because they hear daily news of someone getting shot there, and I think that's on a similar position on the reasonable/ridiculous scale.
Also our media is susceptible to surfacing up anti-China pieces so it'll skew perceptions. I think it could be healthy to visit to get a different perspective other than "that evil brainwashed country on the other side" that I feel is very pervasive. It's an interesting place to visit if you feel like you want to go to a different planet. Though the fact people are now getting scared to even visit makes it feel like the Third Red Scare.
In a country without rule of law it's trivial to fabricate some excuse to grab someone if you want to. Your only recourse is to not go there at all, as whether you get snatched if you are there is outside your control. "Don't smuggle drugs" isn't sufficient.
Xi Jinping appears to believe China's time has come and you're seeing the results: they're behaving like the authoritarian and petulant bullies that they've always been.
Personally I think this behaviour is gift. For too long we've been fed the narrative of China's 'peaceful rise' by people happy to make a quick buck from its gigantic market.
Now we're seeing China's true colors.
In the decades to come, making China a superpower will be looked upon as one of the most foolish things The West has ever done.
This assumes this is something the west did. Or that this is something the west should have prevented.
By trading with China the west certainly accelerated growth. But let's be clear hundreds of millions of people have been pulled up from extreme poverty -- overall I think that's a good thing.
I just believe that all those that called the USA a reckless superpower ain't seen nothing yet.
No system is perfect, but in the US we can generally assume the government to be bound by law.
Also won't be going to China either due to their current genocide of the Uyghurs.
A country that imprisons people just because being poor and runs it's prisons as capitalist corporations, not to mention champions black sites to torture others shouldn't have an extradition agreement with anyone. The US partners in Europe are as bad.
I'm not suggesting the US is alone with this but us Westerners should be careful with pointing fingers at China, (or Russia) and claim that we have any right to lecture them on human rights issues or our superior legal system. Not in the age of Trump, Bannon, Farage, May, Kurz, Orban, Seehofer, and all other fascists in power today.
I was afraid of China because of these random news. But when I finally went there in September, I was surprised as all the internet fear mongering was wrong. When you read your local newspaper and see a murder, are you afraid to go out ? No because it's an outlier, as is the case above. I went alone for 1 month in China and felt much safer than in France. But if you plan to go to China to play the game of law for money, then except to lose big. That's why the country feel safe, the risks are huge, that means dissuasion. Avoid political talk and don't be arrogant = 0 issues there.
I’m not typically a tinfoil hat type of person, but I, at least, have a heavy amount of skepticism towards your comment. Bluntly, it reads like it was taken directly from some pre-approved list of PRC propaganda.
However, we don't need to resort to tinfoil to point out that their anecdote misses the point. "Don't be political" is poor advice when Canadian citizenship is perceived through a political lens.
You're not going to be able to collect enough relevant anecdotes on a brief visit to be able to make a meaningful statement about much beyond your own personal experiences. You can't see or experience much as one person, and in a place like the Soviet Union, things will be hidden from you.
Also, your grammar errors arn’t those typically made by a Francophone. This is a tell.