Last week the US reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. As I mentioned at the time, that deal had implications for the so-called two Michaels. Michael Korvig and Micahel Spavor are two Canadian businessmen who were arrested in China just days after Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Canada. They were charged with crimes which were nearly identical to the ones Meng was facing if she were extradited to the US. They were sent to separate prisons and rarely had contact with their families, lawyers or anyone else. Spavor was convicted of crimes and sentenced to 11 years in a Chinese prison. Korvig’s sentence was pending.

It was obvious to everyone that China was practicing hostage diplomacy, i.e. seizing Canadian citizens on trumped up charges to pressure Canada into releasing Meng. Of course China strenuously denied it, claiming that while the charges against Meng were part of a Trumpian US plot, the charges against the two Michaels were neither political nor connected to Meng’s case.

Given the many years China had made those claims, it wasn’t clear what would happen to the two Michaels once Meng was released. Would China hold them for a few months and later announce they were generously releasing them? In a word, no. What actually happened was that China released them immediately, tossing aside the fiction that cases were unconnected.

Meng left Vancouver, B.C., on a flight for China on Friday afternoon, according to a person familiar with the matter. Hours later, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the two Canadians had been released from prison and were on their way home, accompanied by Dominic Barton, Canada’s ambassador to China…

The “two Michaels,” as they are known in Canada, faced separate, secret trials in March on vague charges of spying and stealing state secrets. A Chinese court found Spavor guilty in August and sentenced him to 11 years in prison. A verdict for Kovrig had not yet been announced before their release Friday.

Making it clear the two cases were connected all along is China’s way of sending a message. Their citizens, at least the important ones, aren’t subject to foreign laws.

China has now made it clear that it will not tolerate enforcement of Western laws against their nationals that run counter to the communist government’s interest. Meng was accused of committing bank and wire fraud to conceal Huawei’s violation of sanctions against Iran. Since it is widely believed that Huawei often acts as an arm of the Chinese government, the accusations had clear political import. Taking the two Michaels hostage showed that Western law enforcement would result in an unacceptably high human price…

The case should frighten any Western national living in or traveling to China. A 2018 estimate showed there are 72,000 Americans living in China, and thousands more travel to the country each year on business or to vacation. Indeed, the two Michaels are not the only people that China has detained for political reasons; the nation regularly arrests foreign nationals on vague allegations of espionage or imposes “exit bans” that prevent a person from leaving the country for an unspecified period of time. The average tourist is probably safe, but anyone who has spoken out against the regime or whose business is involved in sensitive operations may not be. Given the increasingly tense relations between the United States and China, this means thousands of people are placing themselves at risk of politically motivated retaliation.

China’s not-so-subtle threat to citizens of the free nations of the world has arguably been effective. The US and other countries are now on notice that any attempt to interfere with Chinese citizens will result in more hostage taking. But the decision to promptly release the two Michaels didn’t go over well with everyone. It seems there were some Chinese nationalists who were upset to see them released after having been told for years they were enemies of the state.

“The discussion online is that Meng was innocent, but the facts of Kovrig and Spavor’s crimes are irrefutable. The U.S. side releasing Meng was justified, but was China forced into this compromise?” one user wrote on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.

The release of the two Canadians underlines the awkward position Beijing now finds itself in, having claimed for years that authorities had “iron clad” evidence against the pair while drumming up nationalism at home to deflect against criticism that it had engaged in hostage diplomacy…

Other Internet users asked why there had been so little reporting in Chinese media about the Canadians’ release. Most state media have focused on Meng’s homecoming, skating over details of the Michaels’ return to Canada. The state-run Global Times, in mentioning their release, wrote in its English-language version that “the incident of Meng is entirely different from the cases of the two Canadians.”

Yet comments asking for more details on their release were quickly scrubbed from discussion forums. “There is no basis for China’s release of the Michaels. This is not justice in the least,” read one post that has since been deleted. “People keep saying Meng’s case is a great victory for China … but it’s been three years and we had to trade two Canadian spies,” another user wrote on Weibo.

This is how being inside the regime’s bubble works. You only get news for state media which tells you the same lies it tells the rest of the world. The difference is you’re too cut off from reality to know you’re being lied to on a regular basis by a regime that values control far more than it values the truth.