China Secretly Executed Four Canadians. I Could Have Been One of Them

F or over a thousand days, starting in December 2018, China’s government held me hostage in an attempt to blackmail Canada into releasing Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese telecom executive arrested on American criminal charges.

During hundreds of hours of interrogation and false accusations, my captors threatened me with sentences that could extend to life in prison and potentially death. Thankfully, the case against me was purely political, and I had the support of relentless advocates and negotiators who eventually resolved the geopolitical standoff. But I never forget that my fate could have been far worse.

Not everyone has been so fortunate. Earlier this year, China executed four Canadian prisoners, ignoring repeated pleas for clemency from Canadian officials, including the prime minister. Their deaths were kept secret by both governments until the information was leaked to the press on March 19. Mélanie Joly, then foreign minister, confirmed and condemned China’s actions. Amnesty International called the killings “shocking and inhumane” and “a wake-up call for Canada.”

In response, the Chinese embassy said the Canadians had been convicted on drug-related charges and sentenced under Chinese law. A spokesperson for the foreign ministry added that Canada should “stop interfering in China’s judicial sovereignty.” During an interview with CTV News in May, a smiling Wang Di, China’s ambassador to Canada, presented his government’s lethal zero tolerance policy as a global good: “If the drug problem is allowed to be rampant in China,” he said, “it will not only cause damage to China but also to many other countries.”

My own reaction was sadness at this unnecessary destruction of human life. For the dead men, at least the suffering is over. For their families and friends, it is not.

To Canadians and citizens of countries that have ended capital punishment, this spate of executions may seem bafflingly harsh, particularly while China’s officials have rolled out the charm in a search for allies against US president Donald Trump’s trade policies. The executions also undercut efforts by a handful of pro-engagement Canadians who see current disputes with Washington as an opportunity to thaw relations that froze after China detained me and a fellow Canadian and imposed trade sanctions. That crisis largely ended with our release in September 2021, but senior officials have had little direct contact since.

The Canadian government has instead been taking measures to counter a range of growing threats from the China, including political interference, espionage, cyberattacks, economic coercion, and manufacturing overcapacity. In March, China responded to Canadian tariffs with a set of its own on agri-food products. But in recent months, both sides have sought to reopen channels. So why kill Canadians now?

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T he body count is, in fact, even higher. Between this year’s four confirmed executions and earlier ones reportedly carried out between 2014 and 2023, the People’s Republic of China—PRC—has apparently put to death at least seven Canadians in the past decade.

The identities of the recently executed have not been disclosed. But from earlier media reporting, we know that on April 30, 2019, a Jiangmen court sentenced a Canadian man named Fan Wei for his alleged role in a methamphetamine-producing crime ring. A Guangzhou court then sentenced Xu Weihong on August 6, 2020, on charges of manufacturing ketamine, and the next day, a Foshan court sentenced Ye Jianhui on charges of selling drugs such as MDMA. It remains unclear whether these Canadians were among the three previously executed or part of the most recent group of four.

Global Affairs Canada hasn’t publicly questioned the validity of the charges. The disagreement is about capital punishment, which Canada abolished decades ago. To understand why China imposed the death penalty, we must look to the country’s political culture and the authoritarian path being charted under Chinese Communist Party—CCP—general secretary Xi Jinping.

The CCP and the institutions it controls have fused into a single party-state. This vast and uniquely powerful regime is locked in a constant struggle to maintain dominance and legitimacy, viewing internal divisions, domestic dissent, and foreign adversaries as existential threats. It uses every tool at its disposal—ideology, bureaucratic incentives, laws, regulations, coercion, fear, and information control—to mobilize a country of 1.4 billion in service of its goals, from ensuring regime survival to establishing itself as the nexus of power in the global order.

By law, courts must obey CCP dictates, particularly in politically sensitive cases. The party-state has thousands of judges, who—like all of the roughly 20 million state sector employees in China—answer to it. Most of those judges are probably CCP members, since that is, with rare exceptions, a prerequisite for promotion to senior positions.

That top-down legal obedience extends most aggressively to cases the CCP deems politically or morally threatening—and few crimes are framed as more corrosive to national order than drug use. Chinese officialdom has abhorred drugs since the Qing Dynasty, when opium ravaged society and sparked the humiliating Opium Wars. Propaganda narratives still invoke opium as part of a “bitter memory” of foreign exploitation. It was only through large-scale mass campaigns in the 1950s that the party succeeded in eliminating opium use—efforts that made drug enforcement a foundation of modern China and its system of social control.

Under Article 347 of the Criminal Law, producing or trafficking 1,000 grams or more of opium, or fifty grams or more of heroin, methamphetamines, or significant amounts of other narcotics, carries a minimum sentence of fifteen years in prison and can be punishable by death. (In Canada, there are no minimum sentences, and the maximum for extreme cases is life imprisonment.) Legal scholars argue that the massive expansion in drug production and seizures has made China’s thresholds obsolete, resulting in many minor cases consuming significant judicial capacity. Instead of revising the law to better allocate resources and focus on major traffickers rather than minor offenders, sentencing has become influenced by technicalities. Even Chinese scholars have criticized the use of capital punishment for drugs.

That all seven Canadian executions were carried out in Guangdong—a relatively developed and globalized province where the judiciary has ample experience with foreigners—may have been a calculated decision to present them as strictly adjudicated “tie an,” Chinese for “iron cases”: legally airtight and beyond political interference. Courts had the option to impose “death with a two-year reprieve,” a unique sentence often commuted to imprisonment if the offender behaves well during the reprieve period. Instead, they picked the most severe, irreversible punishment.

As is standard procedure with death penalty rulings, China’s Supreme People’s Court—SPC—reviewed each of the four cases and upheld the sentences. These reviews are conducted by SPC’s Criminal Division, a large judicial body based in Beijing that assigns one of its numerous judges to the job, which includes interviewing the accused. This process, the result of reforms enacted in 2007, illustrates the party-state’s blend of procedural rigour and opacity which ensures outsiders have no means of evaluating the truth about charges or fairness of rulings.

International legal practice is to reserve the death penalty for the most serious crimes, like murder. Of the fifty-five countries where capital punishment remains on the books, thirty-four include drug crimes within its scope, but aside from China, only about four other governments routinely impose it for narcotics. Even as global trends have shifted heavily toward abolition, the PRC is an outlier for the sheer scale of its capital punishment. If anything, it’s become even more totalitarian and punitive. Human rights organizations estimate that it executes thousands of people each year for various offences—more than all other countries combined—while concealing the numbers and details behind the veil of state secrecy.

Such extremes have antecedents in millennia of imperial governance, notably ancient Confucian and Legalist philosophical traditions which promote strict hierarchical and harsh autocratic moral frameworks. The CCP itself selectively invokes ancient precepts to legitimize its rule, but one can find evidence of both draconian punishment and moments of leniency in early China, and scholars disagree on the relevance of pre-modern ideas and practices.

More significant is that a callous exercise of power is baked into the CCP’s Marxist–Leninist ideology, organizational behaviour, and political culture. Social engineering trumps individual rights. Civilians are merely economic units that must be kept productive to realize China’s rise to power and guarantee the regime’s survival. Extensive scholarship has documented this Orwellian playbook.

The state secures convictions in over 99 percent of cases, a rate made possible by detaining most suspects before trial, subjecting them to prolonged and coercive interrogations, sharply curtailing the role of defence lawyers, and maintaining a level of judicial secrecy so extreme it often obscures the very existence of cases. Cruelty is policy. It shows up in brutal policing, grim prison conditions, endless sentences, ignored appeals, solitary confinement, torture, and long sentences for dissent and economic offences.

Officials claim the public demands capital punishment and that satisfying that desire matters more than global pressure to stop. For former leader Mao Zedong, executions were a political tool to channel the people’s anger. Chinese legal practitioners indicated in a 2007 survey that the executions are also influenced by the principle of minfen—vengeance. Even today, local governments occasionally hold mass public sentencing events known as shenpan dahui.

But experts argue these claims are just cover for the party-state’s own lethal appetites. More detailed surveys show popular sentiment is shifting and that support for the death penalty is stronger among elites, likely because they worry less about going to the gallows. What little data exists suggests most of those sentenced are poor and uneducated.

To be fair, legal reformers have introduced procedural safeguards, and the official rhetoric is now “kill fewer, kill carefully.” But in practice, initiatives that encourage restraint rarely take hold. I saw this first-hand as a diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing during the rollout of landmark reforms in 2015. Chinese legal scholars I spoke to accurately predicted the changes would instead strengthen the CCP’s ability to rule through law, not in accordance with it. In 2018, Xi launched an anti-crime crackdown that, like previous “strike hard” campaigns, served to merely reassert political control over the means of punishment.

With China’s economy reeling from weak job growth, a real estate slump, falling investment, and shrinking exports, the CCP has leaned harder on national security and social order. That stance now extends to drug crime, but only selectively. Trafficking that harms Chinese citizens is met with unforgiving severity. But the country’s role as a major exporter of fentanyl precursors to North America is a revealing glimpse into what the CCP chooses to police and what it allows to pass.

T he executions were a reminder of the despair and suffering my cellmates and I endured. There were days during solitary confinement when it felt like death would have been preferable. Did these four dread their final moments or see them as release from torment?

Canadians are not the only victims of China’s death penalty. Over a dozen foreigners have been executed in China since 2000, including British, Colombian, Filipino, Japanese, and South Korean citizens—all for drug trafficking. Last year, the party-state threatened to also impose the penalty on Taiwan separatists. By contrast, other states with high capital punishment figures—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Vietnam—almost never execute foreign nationals.

Still, even in China, executing foreigners is rare and typically requires high-level political assent. Killing four at a stroke is unprecedented in recent memory. The reason might be as simple as a bureaucracy on autopilot. But other dynamics may also have been in play.

The CCP cultivates a reputation for severity to show strength at home and deter challengers abroad. It is also one of a few autocracies that use foreign prisoners for geopolitical leverage. In rare cases, such as mine, the detention is politically motivated. In others, a foreign citizen may be detained for a different reason and then find their case instrumentalized after relations sour. When default punishments are so severe, the legal process becomes a warning in itself, even as pious assertions of rule of law maintain plausible deniability. Arrests, trials, rulings, and executions can all be timed to send signals.

Short of military force, nothing tells a government that it’s in China’s doghouse quite so viscerally as locking up or killing one of its citizens, and the threat that more might follow can further constrain behaviour and mute criticism. The CCP is utterly transactional and has no compunction about using humans as bargaining chips to extract concessions.

The party-state goes out of its way to mask the political calculations behind such cases—but the tools are there when it chooses to use them. Its Criminal Procedure Law contains guidance for handling criminal cases involving foreign nationals, including consideration of diplomatic interests. Internal guidelines allow senior court officials to monitor these cases closely, and CCP rules obligate party-affiliated judges to seek clearance from higher authorities before moving forward. And as in all bureaucracies, there are implicit incentives for underlings to anticipate what superiors want and act accordingly.

The Canadian executions reportedly took place in late January, around the time Trump called on US courts to carry out pending death sentences—he had previously spoken in favour of applying the penalty to drug trafficking—and began pressuring China to crack down on fentanyl precursors. Chinese officials would have concluded that Washington was unlikely to object if they killed a few drug dealers.

The party-state’s views of Canada may also have played a role. Seeing Canadians as distracted by an election and weakened by a crisis with Washington, its courts perhaps seized an opportunity to clear a case backlog exacerbated by COVID-19 lockdowns. Conducting the executions during the waning days of then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s mandate minimized the impact on future relations.

A more pessimistic interpretation would be that the CCP employed a classic strategy of xia ma wei—an initial show of strength to psychologically intimidate—and deliberately moved the cases to their terminal stage to signal ire over Canadian moves on trade, investment, and foreign interference that obstructed Beijing’s objectives. In March, China also introduced countermeasures against foreign sanctions.

For a decade, PRC police and prosecutors have been trying to get Chinese individuals in Canada they consider fugitives to return to face charges. For reasons that should by now be evident, the Canadian government has been increasingly reluctant to sign an extradition treaty or otherwise co-operate. This could have left Chinese law enforcement officials ill-disposed toward an “unreliable” Canada.

Once the SPC upheld the death verdicts, only officials of the highest rank, primarily those on the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, had the authority to intervene. Such officials are extremely busy and may not even have been aware of the cases. Even if they were, they would not be inclined to show compassion for drug crimes.

A final foreign policy implication is that while Xi might prefer better relations with Ottawa, he views Canada as a core member of an adversarial, American-led Western alliance and was unwilling to spend political capital to please a prime minister he disliked. And so the party-state gears ground forward to their pre-programmed, and fatal, conclusion.

W hat can Canadians do? Obviously, anyone contemplating going to China should stay far away from illegal drugs and read the latest travel advisory, which warns: “Exercise a high degree of caution in China due to the risk of arbitrary enforcement of local laws.”

It’s also important to recognize that the party-state has a unique interpretation of ethno-nationalism. These seven executed individuals were all naturalized Canadians of Chinese origin. At least four entered China with Canadian passports and received Canadian consular support—meaning that diplomats could regularly check on them, convey messages from family, try to deliver care packages, and signal to their jailers that mistreatment would draw official protest. At least two others used Chinese passports they had retained and were denied consular access, leaving them unreachable and more vulnerable.

Officially, the PRC does not recognize dual nationality for Chinese citizens. Article 9 of the Nationality Law stipulates that when PRC nationals move abroad and take on foreign citizenship, their Chinese nationality is automatically revoked. (There are exceptions for citizens from Hong Kong and Macao.) In practice, many émigrés do not formally make a declaration of renunciation and keep their PRC passports for travel to China. Doing so carries the grave risk the government will treat them as Chinese citizens. The party-state behaves as though it retains some authority over people who trace their origins to China—particularly ethnic Han, Tibetans, and Uyghurs born in the PRC, as well as Taiwanese, since Beijing considers the island a rogue province.

The dynamic is self-reinforcing. If other governments appear indifferent to how the PRC treats former citizens, the party-state may see that as permission to exert greater control over them and treat them more brutally than individuals it considers entirely foreign. This tendency further manifests in the transnational repression it inflicts on China’s diaspora.

Canada’s most notable example is Huseyin Celil, a Uyghur man who gained refugee status in Canada in 2001 and citizenship in 2005. The following year, while visiting family in Uzbekistan, local police arrested him at China’s behest and extradited him to the PRC, where he was sentenced to life in prison. Despite Canada’s efforts, China has held him incommunicado without consular access, and nothing has been heard from him for a decade. The party-state’s insistence that Celil is a citizen of China is absurd under its own laws.

There have been other such cases. In 2017, Chinese police abducted Canadian businessman Xiao Jianhua from Hong Kong, brought him to the mainland, and, in a closed trial, sentenced him to thirteen years for embezzlement. Australian writer Yang Hengjun remains in Chinese prison under a suspended death sentence. Americans David Lin and Kai Lee suffered lengthy wrongful detainment until their release last year. The Ministry of State Security arrested Australian journalist Cheng Lei, a presenter for China’s CGTN, on trumped-up charges to punish Canberra for sins including calling an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. She survived three years in a detention centre that held multiple Canadians, including me.

And it continues. The Canadian Press reported that a Canadian couple, John Chang and Allison Lu, had been imprisoned in Shanghai in 2016 over a customs dispute related to their wine business. Lu was released in January 2017 but subject to an exit ban forbidding her from leaving China. Chang was sentenced to five years in prison and released in 2021. On April 5 this year, we learned that another Chinese Canadian businessman, Li Yonghui, had been detained for the past five years without trial under murky accusations of gathering funds illegally.

It’s hard to tell whether these cases are legitimate or the sentences proportionate. Arrests and prosecutions can be influenced by personal revenge, corruption, business deals gone wrong, or even cash grabs by budget-strapped local governments, a recent innovation that the party’s own People’s Daily likened to “deep-sea fishing.”

T here is little we can offer the families of those executed beyond sympathy and, if they request it, support. But for other foreign citizens still held in China, experiencing levels of suffering no one deserves, more can be done.

One notable case is that of Robert Schellenberg, arrested on drug charges in 2014 and sentenced to fifteen years in November 2018. The court reviewed his original verdict at a one-day hearing on December 29 and converted it to a death sentence in January 2019 while diplomatic relations were cratering over Canada’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou. He has lived under that shadow for six years.

Global Affairs Canada acknowledges that approximately 100 Canadians like Celil and Schellenberg remain in detention or prison in China. Several thousand nationals of other countries share their plight. I was exposed to the reality of detainees as a diplomat in China, but I feel it far more intimately now that I’m part of a strange community of former prisoners, a global village of the once damned. I can tell you that execution in China is a gratuitous deterrent, because incarceration—involving punishing rounds of questioning, being kept in a room with lights on round the clock, and the withholding of medical care—already involves more suffering than any human deserves. (For heart-rending illustrations, read the accounts of former prisoners such as Kevin and Julia Garratt, Peter Humphrey, Matthew Radalj, and Cheng Lei. Study, as well, the horrifying reports of organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Safeguard Defenders. The latter recently released a handbook, Missing in China, which provides advice on how to assist someone detained there.)

Saving lives of individual prisoners requires a pragmatic blend of discreet, face-saving diplomacy, reciprocal gestures, and calibrated public attention that varies from case to case. Such advocacy is never easy, but if ministers, senior officials, and members of Parliament respectfully but persistently make clear that the well-being of all Canadians is a top priority, it can make a difference. In 2016, for example, China’s then premier Li Keqiang conveyed that China had granted clemency to a Canadian prisoner as a friendly gesture to Canada’s new prime minister at the time, Justin Trudeau.

With Beijing seeking to recast itself as a defender of a rules-based international order and hoping to reopen high-level dialogue with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government, there’s now room for the relationship to improve. It won’t bring back these seven men, who might have lived if the timing of their cases had been more fortuitous. But it could be a rare opportunity to help Canadians and other foreign nationals still held in China.

The PRC defends its judicial system as a symbol of sovereignty and legitimacy. Directing isolated pressure, public shaming, and moral opprobrium at specific verdicts may only result in defensive digging in and doubling down. Canadian representatives can instead quietly frame clemency, transparency, and full consular access as part of a broader stabilization in relations and a cost-free way to create the conditions for more productive dialogue on issues Chinese officials prioritize. They can also indicate that unacceptable behaviour will have material consequences for relations with all aligned countries.

Each diplomatic interaction is a chance to stress that rebuilding trust requires depoliticizing how citizens are treated and respecting international agreements—such as the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which guarantees access to prisoners and court proceedings, and the Canada–China Consular Agreement, which allows detainees to receive care packages that include books and writing supplies. These are minor things to officials but make an enormous difference to detainees.

Depending on the case, persistent advocacy together with strategic leverage can drive meaningful progress: at a minimum, improved conditions of detention and access; sometimes, review and commutation of sentences; transfer of the prisoner to serve their sentence in their home country; even humanitarian parole. China has done so before. Advocacy is most effective when coordinated with like-minded governments that have citizens of their own to protect in China.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials might keep in mind that they or a family member could one day be prisoners too. Ambassador Wang might have been less sanguine about these executions if he had paused to reflect on the fate of his one-time boss, former foreign minister Qin Gang, who abruptly disappeared into China’s carceral underworld in June 2023. I’ve known several other detained officials, and all of them were surprised to find themselves crushed by the machinery of their own state.

The Analects of Confucius offers timeless advice: “Do not do to others what you do not want done to you.” And as Nelson Mandela (whose Long Walk to Freedom inspired me during my own confinement) said: “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.”

A nation with China’s potential for greatness can afford to be magnanimous. The way for the PRC to display true confidence, authority, and legitimacy is to show mercy and stay the executioner’s hand.