Michael Kovrig, former hostage of the Chinese state

The sensation of being shackled was familiar. China’s security machine had worked to break Mr Kovrig’s spirit from the moment he was snatched from a Beijing street by black-clad agents in December 2018. Each time that his captors moved him around his detention centre in Fengtai, a southern suburb of the capital, he was blindfolded, manacled and strapped into a wheelchair. But on this day of his trial China’s “zero covid" controls added an extra twist of horror. The lanky Canadian, muscles toned by months of yoga, press-ups and planks in his cell, was ordered to don a stifling white hazmat suit, booties, face-mask, gloves and plastic goggles, before entering the courtroom.

Though pinioned and half-blinded, Mr Kovrig stuck to his plan of resistance. He had a 20-page statement to deliver to a panel of three impassive judges, drafted over weeks and translated by his own hand into Chinese.

The judges, a trio of scowling prosecutors, Mr Kovrig’s two Chinese lawyers and an interpreter were his audience. Canadian diplomats should have been allowed to attend the hearing, according to a consular agreement. But China declared the trial too sensitive for foreigners to attend, obliging Canadian and other foreign envoys to wait on the street outside. Mr Kovrig was undaunted. He told the judges that he was a political hostage, detained shortly after Meng Wanzhou, an executive of Huawei, a giant Chinese technology firm, was arrested by Canadian police while changing planes in Vancouver airport on a warrant from American prosecutors.

From his cramped dock, Mr Kovrig added that state security agents had broken China’s own laws by holding him in solitary confinement for six months. He denied being a spy, insisting that his work in China as a diplomat and policy researcher was carried out openly. Indeed, he went on, it was his captors who had contravened the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic relations by interrogating him about his work at the Canadian embassy in Beijing between 2014 and 2016, before he took leave of absence to advise the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based organisation working on conflict prevention. Such lawless behaviour was beneath a great nation like China, he told them. If the judges had the slightest independence and sense of justice, they would release him now.

Mr Kovrig did not expect for a moment that the judges would agree. In China, 99.95% of criminal trials end in convictions. Indeed, prosecutors said publicly that Mr Kovrig was guilty just days after he was first detained, along with a second Canadian, Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur who ran cultural tours into North Korea. Instead, the ex-diplomat hoped to confront his audience in that Chinese courtroom with their own lack of autonomy. As he recalls that moment now, while he delivered his statement: “I’m the only man who is master of himself, the only man who is speaking freely. Everyone else is following the system’s script."

Chinese diplomats denied in public that the two Michaels—as the press soon dubbed them—were being held as hostages until Canada released Ms Meng. But in private, Chinese officials told Canadian diplomats that if they wanted the two Michaels released, they had to set Ms Meng free. In September 2021 China stopped trying to conceal its hostage-taking. Mr Kovrig and Mr Spavor were allowed to fly home to Canada on the same day that Ms Meng was permitted to leave, after 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, who is now 52, has spoken for the first time about his ordeal. Over long hours of interviews in a Canadian hotel, he talked to The Economist’s Drum Tower podcast about what his captivity has to say about today’s China.

The word “stubborn" hardly begins to convey the Canadian’s approach to his detention. Denied books for many months, he finally asked for copies of a sacred Communist Party text: Xi Jinping’s “The Governance of China". He correctly guessed that his captors would not dare deny a request to study the wisdom of China’s supreme leader. Later he asked for works of Stoic and Buddhist philosophy, and for a dictionary to improve his Chinese. To stave off despair he recalled his whole life in order like a film, while walking thousands of paces a day.

Elements of that life story were echoed in his ordeal. 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 now-painful irony, his stage name was Michael K, a homage to Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial". He later worked for the United Nations, as well as the Canadian foreign service.

And as he planned for his trial he was guided by family tales of his grandfather, Janos Kovrig, who was detained and tortured by Hungarian communist authorities in 1946. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc the family was able to obtain Janos’s file. Locked up in Beijing, Mr Kovrig found a bleak sort of solace in the bureaucratic thoroughness of China’s security machine, with its endless paperwork and demands that detainees write confessions and beg the Communist Party for mercy.

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. “It’s a bureaucratic authoritarian system," he tells Drum Tower. “They’re going to file this away somewhere. One day somebody will know."

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