China likes Canada’s ‘cool head’ amid U.S. ‘smears,’ envoy says

Detained Canadian duo getting good treatment, ambassador assures

envoy in Ottawa says that while the United States is “smearing” his country over COVID-19, the People’s Republic appreciates Canada’s “cool-headed” co-operation on battling the pandemic.

Ambassador Cong Peiwu also says he wants Canadians to know that Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor are healthy and getting good treatment in Chinese custody.

The two Canadians have been detained for more than 500 days and China cut off their visits from Canadian diplomats earlier in the year as part of its efforts to limit access to prisons during the pandemic.

In an exclusive interview with The Canadian Press, Cong said he has heard nothing new about a proposal by Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne to allow diplomats to conduct a “virtual” visit using the internet to check on Kovrig and Spavor. They were imprisoned in December 2018 after Canada arrested Chinese hightech executive Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant, plunging Sino-Canadian relations to a new low.

Cong says Canada and China are working closely to fight the pandemic, and that he is awaiting a report from the Canadian government on how a million face masks that Canada imported from China were found to be inadequate for health-care workers.

“China attaches high importance to export quality control. The competent departments have recently written out more rigorous regulatory measures,” Cong said.

The legal issues in the KovrigSpavor-Meng dispute remain unchanged: China says Canada’s arrest of Meng, who faces bank fraud charges in the United States, is unjust; Canada says Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Spavor, an entrepreneur, were picked up arbitrarily.

But Cong positioned Canada as an important partner for China in the continuing battle against COVID-19 and he used the interview to unleash a counterattack against the U.S., which has temporarily suspended all funding to the World Health Organization.

Cong didn’t mention U.S. President Donald Trump by name, but he referred to his administration’s accusations that the WHO covered up early aspects of the outbreak and that China initially withheld information about it from the organization.

More recently, Trump and his supporters have also been putting forth a conspiracy theory that an infectious disease laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the source of the pandemic. A U.S. intelligence statement released Thursday says the virus that causes COVID-19 was not deliberately engineered, but work is continuing to determine whether it might have escaped the Wuhan lab while being studied.

“China is sharing experience while the U.S. is smearing China,” Cong said. “China has actively shared epidemic information and anti-epidemic experience with the WHO and many other countries, including Canada.” That co-operation has extended to 150 countries and international organizations, including on recent video conferences, he added.