A plea deal involving a senior Chinese telecommunications executive that coincided with China’s release of Western hostages exposes a fundamental flaw in President Joe Biden’s approach to Beijing and raises the risk that authoritarian states seize more Americans.
“They took hostages,” Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat and senior member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “They defeated our criminal law by taking hostages. They took Canadian hostages. They took American hostages. And they were successful.”
That frank admission dovetails with Chinese propaganda about the release of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, who faced extradition from Canada on charges that she committed fraud in order to facilitate Iran’s circumvention of U.S. sanctions. Justice Department officials touted the plea deal as Meng “tak[ing] responsibility for her principal role” in the sanctions-busting fraud. But Beijing has celebrated the outcome, and Sherman takes it as a sign that Biden is hamstrung by a desire to avoid the economic fallout from a major confrontation with China.
“Everybody’s in favor of doing something vis-a-vis China, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience any powerful American,” Sherman said of Biden’s team. “I think he’s got smart people who have great meetings, who use all of the levers at their disposal, and they don’t have any levers. There’s one lever, tariffs, and they don’t want to use them.”
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In the meantime, Chinese officials have all but advised other countries to seize hostages as leverage in disputes with the United States.
“We believe that more countries will step forward as China did and defend all kinds of illegal unilateral sanctions, long-arm jurisdiction and political framing, jointly uphold international equity and justice, and defend the basic norms governing international relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said this week.
China’s willingness to stoop to such tactics gives Beijing an advantage in certain situations, one Republican said.
“It’s a really dangerous game to play,” Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a lot easier for a country like China that is not open and doesn’t respect the rule of law to take hostages or to jail Americans or Westerners on trumped-up charges as a way of helping their own citizens, like with the Huawei executive, evade justice.”
China isn’t the only government to engage in hostage diplomacy, according to Western officials and the families of detained citizens. U.S. lawmakers have decried Russia’s arrest of Michigan native Paul Whalen and Texas resident Trevor Reed, two former Marines sentenced to lengthy prison terms in unrelated cases, but it is not clear what the Russians want in exchange.
“There remains uncertainty about what might trigger Paul’s release,” said David Whelan, the detained American’s twin brother. “There’s no obvious connection between Paul’s case and any other … so the asymmetry of it makes me wonder if they have a specific reason to hold Paul and they’re waiting for the right offer or if they’re just holding him against a rainy day.”
Meijer suggested that human rights sanctions might prove useful to punish hostage-taking, particularly if U.S. measures are backed by a broader Western coalition. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks likewise underscored the importance of coordination with allies while implying that U.S. officials might have more surreptitious ways of retaliating.
“Economically, as I said … there’s ways that you can do things that makes it very difficult, and all the time you don’t have to articulate what they are,” the New York Democrat said. “In this business, sometimes, you do things and the general public, or the general sphere, won’t even know what’s done.”
Yet Sherman maintained that “the Wall Street generation” dissuaded Biden, and former President Donald Trump before him, from imposing the kinds of tariffs needed to bludgeon China’s economy — imposts, Sherman advises, as high as 25-30%.
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“It doesn’t matter how tough you are with China. If you can’t be tough with Wall Street, you’re going to be unsuccessful in being tough with China,” Sherman said. “It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter whether your different branches of government get along well. It doesn’t matter how smoothly your meetings run. What matters is, are you willing to impose tariffs on China? If you’re not, you’re going to lose.”
