I guess this could just have easily been titled Michaelopoly, but I wanted to go back slightly further to focus on the fact that the US was playing just as many games with Meng Wanzhou as China was with the "two Michaels." The fraud case was always weak and should have been applied against Huawei as a firm, rather than trying to detain a specific executive. It also points out the danger that when the US attempts to enforce its laws (which ultimately goes back the the US breaking with international treaties and trying to punish any firm still doing business with Iran), it opens itself up to other countries trying to enforce their laws on US companies that primarily do business in the US -- and may not even have branches in the other country. And of course, China has shown no compunction about getting other countries tangled up in what is essentially an on-going dispute between the US and China.
The Meng case was particularly complicated as the border guards in Vancouver made a number of procedural mistakes to the point that if this were any normal case (and not one where the Trump-infected Justice Department was really leaning on Canada), Meng would likely have had all charges stayed.
Biden and his team managed to use deferred prosecution as a technique to save enough face on both sides to resolve the crisis. Meng agreed to some "wrong-doing" but the extradition request was dropped and she was allowed to return to China. Most observers were expecting for China to wait a couple of weeks and then release the two Michael, but in fact they were put on a plane back to Canada on that very deal was announced. In fact, they may actually have landed in Canada before Meng landed in China! Later Chinese officials said this was based on compassionate grounds as they had medical conditions, but I'm not sure there is anyone on the planet that believes this. There has almost never been a clearer case of hostage diplomacy.
At any rate, I do find it more than a bit ironic that deferred prosecution was the key, as Jodi Wilson-Raybould was so opposed to its use in the SNC-Lavalin case. While the situation was different (and the actual public interest benefit was mostly limited to Quebec not Canada as a whole), using it in that case wouldn't have been completely out of line. I have to say her holier-than-thou air and refusal to cut deals really made it so clear she should not have gotten into federal politics in the first place...
On a completely different note, it is astonishing how much China is willing to pay for good press. I knew someone back in B.C. whose mother went on a two week trip to China heavily subsidized by the Chinese government. (While there are times I think I would have liked to see China, I just can't imagine going while the current regime is in power, particularly after they crushed all dissent in Hong Kong...) At any rate, I reviewed a fairly poor book by two Chinese academics that was to some extent white-washed by the participation of a scholar from the UK. But the book itself was clearly funded by China and more or less adopted the Chinese state propaganda line whole-heartedly, which I found appalling. Where this gets interesting is that since that point, I have been invited four or five times to present my "research" in other journals, which apparently are Chinese fronts. This would be an easy trap for a junior scholar to fall into... I can't even imagine what would happen after falling down that rabbit-hole.
Edit (11/19): Today I was asked to join as a guest editor to some journal, which sounds respectable but clearly is just a front for the Chinese government, and then just publish whatever I want. Crazy! You always hear about how much effort Russia and China are putting into the disinformation infowars, but it only hits home when you keep getting spammed over and over, just because you publish one review of a book on Chinese urbanization. It's a strange and frankly depressing brave new world. I'm not sorry I grew up along with the rise of personal computers, but I'm so glad I didn't grow up with today's internet.
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