Imagine a scenario where a senior American business executive is suddenly detained overseas, at the behest of the Chinese government, which accuses him or her of violating its national security. American and Western media would undoubtedly express outrage and have a field day bashing China.
Yet when the equivalent happened last week with Canada’s detention of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on behalf of the United States, questions about the arrest’s legitimacy, or the presence of political motives behind it, were largely absent.
This is not to argue that Meng is completely innocent of breaking American law. But it is important to note that the right to this extraterritorial behavior is asymmetric: only the United States is allowed to wield it “legitimately.” No other country, such as Malaysia, which is trying to recover 1MDB-related money from Goldman Sachs, can dare to act in this way. If other nations tired of U.S. judicial bullying – and there are many – start to retaliate by detaining Americans and citizens of its Western allies, things could become very messy, very quickly.
But Meng’s arrest leads to a different question. Despite protests to the contrary, the United States made a choice to escalate tensions by taking this action. Why?
Some have connected Meng’s arrest to the wider trade tensions between China and the United States. Huawei had already been accused by Western politicians of being a front for the Chinese government, and it has been denied access to Western markets. Given that technology is one of the few areas where the West is still clearly dominant, people have viewed this pressure as strategic economic leverage.
But this misses a more fundamental cause for the worries about China, which now spread beyond trade and economics. Articles about China’s technology and surveillance, such as its “social credit system,” worry about a techno-dystopia, despite similar surveillance being done in Western countries (and by their own tech companies). The United States has expressed concern about the activities of university students from China, while Australian politicians have spent months debating “foreign influence” in their domestic politics: a rather poorly veiled reference to China.
A good case study is Google’s cancelled re-entry into China with a Chinese-compliant version of Google search. This was met with controversy both by Western media and Google’s own employees. This is partly the company’s own fault, due to its loud and public withdrawal from China almost 10 years ago. But similar concessions by Google in smaller countries have not sparked such controversy; only China has. Interestingly, a Chinese version of Google might actually be of value to Chinese people, as local search engines like Baidu have been plagued with scandal, hoaxes, and frauds. But the fear that Western observers have about China means that this benefit could be denied them.
One could argue that this is part and parcel of the usual geopolitical conflict between an incumbent power and a rising one, or that they are merely representations of how the economic relationship between China and the West continues to change.
