China airs complaints over arrest of executive

BEIJING — China summoned the U.S. ambassador to Beijing on Sunday to protest the detention of an executive of the Chinese electronics giant Huawei after her arrest in Canada at Washington’s behest.

Also Sunday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said President Donald Trump was not aware of the arrest when he sat down to dinner recently with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng “lodged solemn representations and strong protests” with Ambassador Terry Branstad against the detention of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. Meng, who is reportedly suspected of trying to evade U.S. trade restrictions on Iran, was detained Dec. 1 while changing planes in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The Xinhua report quoted Le as calling Meng’s detention “extremely egregious.” It quoted Le as calling for the U.S. to “immediately correct its wrong actions” and said China would take further steps based on Washington’s response.

China demanded that the U.S. vacate an order for her arrest.

The move followed the summoning of Canadian Ambassador John McCallum on Saturday over Meng’s detention and a similar protest warning of “grave consequences” if she is not released.

The Canadian province of British Columbia said in a statement Sunday that it canceled a trade mission to China because of Meng’s detention.

Huawei is the biggest global supplier of network gear for phone and Internet companies and has been the focus of deepening U.S. security concerns over its ties to the Chinese government. The U.S. has pressured European countries and other allies to limit use of Huawei’s technology, warning they could be opening themselves up to surveillance and theft of information.

Meng’s arrest has threatened to increase U.S.-China trade tensions, and it shook stock markets globally last week.

Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said Chinese pressure on Canada’s government won’t work.

“Perhaps because the Chinese state controls its judicial system, Beijing sometimes has difficulty understanding or believing that courts can be independent in a rule-of-law country. There’s no point in pressuring the Canadian government. Judges will decide,” Paris tweeted in response to the comments from Beijing.

A Canadian prosecutor urged a Vancouver court to deny bail to Meng.

TRUMP’S REACTION

Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, was detained at

the request of the U.S. during a layover at the Vancouver airport on the same day that Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi, agreed over dinner to a 90-day truce in a trade dispute that threatens to disrupt global commerce.

An unnamed senior U.S. official with direct knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post last week that Trump learned of the arrest only after the meal had concluded and that he reacted with anger.

Kudlow agreed that Trump did not know about the arrest at the time of the dinner but said he was not angry when he learned about it.

“He did not know,” Kudlow said on Fox News Sunday. “He did not know, and he had no reaction afterward. … He didn’t know. I’ll just state that unequivocally. He learned way later.”

Asked whether he could guarantee that Meng will not be released as a negotiating tactic, Kudlow said no.

“I can’t guarantee anything,” he said. “This is a DOJ, NSC, law enforcement issue,” referring to the Justice Department and the National Security Council.

“I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. … It seems to me that there’s a trade lane … and there’s a law enforcement

lane,” he said.

“They’re different channels, and I think they will be viewed that way for quite some time,” Kudlow said.

The U.S. alleges that Huawei used a Hong Kong shell company to sell equipment in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. It also says that Meng and Huawei misled American banks about business dealings in Iran.

The surprise arrest raises doubts about whether the trade truce will hold and whether the world’s two biggest economies can resolve the complicated issues that divide them.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation, said he considered the Huawei case and the trade talks separate matters.

“It’s my view that it shouldn’t really have much of an impact,” he said.

Lighthizer, who’s seen as a China hawk in the Trump administration, set a high bar for a deal with Chinese officials, saying the U.S. was looking for meaningful and verifiable “structural changes” related to Chinese policies aimed at stealing U.S. technology.

He also said he couldn’t reassure financial markets, which have been nervous about the possibility of a truce

crumbling, that a deal would be forthcoming by a March 1 deadline.

“As far as I’m concerned, it is a hard deadline,” Lighthizer said. “When I talk to the president of the United States, he is not talking about going beyond March. He is talking about getting a deal, if there is a deal to be done in the next 90 days.”

CHARGES IN U.S.

Canadian prosecutor John Gibb-Carsley said in a court hearing Friday that a warrant for Meng’s arrest had been issued in New York on Aug. 22. He said Meng, arrested en route to Mexico from Hong Kong, was aware of the investigation and had been avoiding the United States for months, even though her teenage son goes to school in Boston.

Gibb-Carsley alleged that Huawei had done business in Iran through a Hong Kong company called Skycom. Meng, he said, had misled U.S. banks into thinking that Huawei and Skycom were separate when, in fact, “Skycom was Huawei.” Meng has contended that Huawei sold Skycom in 2009.

In urging the court to reject Meng’s bail request, Gibb-Carsley said the Huawei executive had vast resources and a strong incentive to bolt: She’s facing fraud charges in the United States that could put her in prison for 30 years.

The hearing will resume today.

Huawei, in a brief statement emailed to The Associated Press, said that “we have every confidence that the Canadian and U.S. legal systems will reach the right conclusion.”

Canadian officials have declined to comment on Chinese threats of retaliation over the case, instead emphasizing the independence of Canada’s judiciary along with the importance of Ottawa’s relationship with Beijing.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland said Canada “has assured China that due process is absolutely being followed in Canada, that consular access for China to Ms. Meng will absolutely be provided.”

“We are a rule-of-law country, and we will be following our laws as we have thus far in this matter and as we will continue to do,” Freeland said Friday.

Information for this article was contributed by Christopher Bodeen and Rob Gillies of The Associated Press; by Elise Viebeck of The Washington Post; and by Shawn Donnan of Bloomberg News.