For weeks of front-end news, a China-Canada rift has gripped Canada. The story-line is endlessly repeated and runs like this: “Experts from both sides of the border agree that imprisonment of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou is strictly abiding by the rule of law, and China cannot or does not want to understand how the rule of law works”.
The unifying plot is that Canada must continue to hold the CFO of China’s world-leading telecommunications giant in detention on behalf of a US extradition warrant to uphold the rule of law as sacred.
That it is an extra-territorial demand for no offense committed under Canada or international law is not reported. That the offense alleged is against a unilateral US embargo of Iran by its export controls to which Canada is not a party is deleted across the media and all official statements. Anyone who does not join into this ruling story or connects the covered-up facts of its story-line is drowned out and removed from the public eye, including Canada’s own senior statesman and well-liked ambassador to China.
In general, any revealing questions are silenced. All the legal parameters of the case dissolve instead into the empty slogan ‘rule of law’. Background editors of what can be spoken on the public stage ensure at every level that no diversion is allowed.
