The sensation of being shackled was familiar. China’s security machine had worked to break Michael Kovrig’s spirit from the moment he was snatched from a Beijing street by black-clad agents in December 2018. He was blindfolded, manacled and strapped into a wheelchair every time his captors moved him from his cell. But in late March 2021, as Mr Kovrig’s captors delivered him to a windowless courtroom in south Beijing for a closed-door, one-day criminal trial, China’s “zero covid” controls added an extra twist of horror. The lanky Canadian, a former diplomat turned policy researcher, was ordered to don a stifling white hazmat suit, booties, face-mask, gloves and plastic goggles before entering the courtroom. Mr Kovrig was undaunted. He told the judges that he was a political hostage. He had been detained
shortly after Meng Wanzhou, an executive of Huawei, a giant Chinese technology firm, was arrested by Canadian police while changing planes in Vancouver on a warrant from American prosecutors. He did not expect for a moment that the judges would agree. Instead, he hoped to confront his audience in that Chinese courtroom with their own lack of autonomy. In September 2021 Mr Kovrig, with another similarly abducted fellow Canadian, Michael Spavor, was finally allowed to fly home to Canada, on the same day that Ms Meng was permitted to leave. She had reached a deal with American prosecutors, in which she avoided criminal charges over alleged breaches of sanctions on Iran. Three years after his release, Mr Kovrig, now 52, has spoken for the
first time to The Economist’s Drum Tower podcast about his ordeal, and his life. The son of a university professor, he grew up in Toronto in a family of eastern European emigrés. In his 20s he moved to Budapest, where he worked as a journalist and sang in a punk band. In a painful irony, his stage name was Michael K, a homage to Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial”. And as he planned for his own trial he was guided by family tales of his grandfather, Janos Kovrig, who was detained and tortured by Hungarian communist authorities in 1949. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc the family was able to obtain Janos’s file. Mr Kovrig hopes that by refusing to confess and by making his court statement for the record, he left a trace of his resistance for posterity. “They’re going to file this away somewhere. One day somebody will know.”
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