Detention of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig
Based on Wikipedia: Detention of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig
Hostage Diplomacy: The 1,019 Days That Shook Canada-China Relations
On December 10, 2018, two Canadian men vanished into China's opaque detention system. For nearly three years, they would endure interrogations lasting up to eight hours a day, cells with lights that never turned off, and the slow realization that they had become pawns in a geopolitical chess match between superpowers. Their ordeal would strain Canada's relationship with China to the breaking point—and ultimately expose troubling questions about whether one of them had been unwittingly used as a spy by his own government.
Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor—known in the press simply as "the Two Michaels"—were arrested exactly nine days after Canadian police detained Meng Wanzhou at Vancouver's airport. The timing was not coincidental.
The Huawei Princess
Meng Wanzhou was no ordinary business executive. As the chief financial officer of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, she occupied a position of extraordinary importance. But what made her arrest truly explosive was her family connection: her father, Ren Zhengfei, had founded Huawei and built it into one of China's most successful global corporations.
The arrest happened at the request of the United States government. American prosecutors alleged that Meng had committed financial fraud—charges that could carry up to ten years in prison if proven. Canada, bound by its extradition treaty with the United States, was obligated to detain her while the legal process played out.
What Canada perhaps didn't anticipate was Beijing's response.
Two Very Different Canadians
The men who would become diplomatic hostages could hardly have been more different in their backgrounds, though their work orbited similar parts of the world.
Michael Kovrig had spent roughly a decade as a Canadian diplomat, serving in various capacities for the Foreign Affairs department. Between 2014 and 2016, he was posted to Beijing as first secretary and vice consul, then served as consul in Hong Kong. After leaving government service, he joined the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization headquartered in Brussels that works to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts around the world. From their Hong Kong office, Kovrig wrote about geopolitical issues including China's expanding military presence in Africa and the escalating North Korea nuclear crisis.
Michael Spavor took a more unconventional path. He became a consultant and eventually founded Paektu Cultural Exchange, a small organization that did something few Westerners dared: it facilitated sports, cultural, tourism, and business exchanges with North Korea. Spavor had managed to build genuine relationships inside the hermit kingdom, including, remarkably, a personal connection with Kim Jong-un himself. In a world where almost no one has access to North Korea's inner circle, Spavor was a rare bridge.
These two Canadians knew each other. That relationship would later become the source of bitter accusations.
Into the Black Box
Chinese authorities accused both men of "spying on state secrets or intelligence for parties outside the territory of China." The charges were vague, the evidence kept secret, and the timing transparently political.
Yet China maintained—and continues to maintain—that the cases were entirely separate from Meng Wanzhou's detention. This assertion struck most international observers as implausible. As American President Joe Biden would later put it bluntly, Kovrig and Spavor were being used as "bartering chips."
The conditions of their detention were harsh by any standard. Both men were interrogated for extended periods daily. The overhead lights in their cells burned continuously—a technique known to cause sleep deprivation and psychological distress. Perhaps most troubling for a democratic country's citizens, they were denied access to lawyers and, for long stretches, to consular officials who might advocate for their welfare.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called their arrest "arbitrary." The word carried diplomatic weight: under international law, arbitrary detention is a human rights violation.
The Long Wait
Days turned into weeks. Weeks became months. Months stretched into years.
In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, the Chinese government made a small humanitarian gesture: Kovrig was permitted a telephone call with his sick father. It was a rare moment of contact in an otherwise isolating ordeal.
By June 2020, formal charges had been filed. Both men were accused of spying on national secrets and providing state secrets to entities outside China. Under Chinese law, such crimes could result in life sentences.
The trials, when they finally came in March 2021, were exercises in opacity. Spavor's two-hour hearing in Dandong ended without a verdict. Because the case involved national security, the Canadian Embassy's chargé d'affaires was denied entry. Diplomats from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden all requested access and were all turned away.
Kovrig's trial followed the same pattern: closed doors, no immediate verdict, a promise that judgment would come at some unspecified future date.
A Guilty Verdict—With Suspicious Timing
On August 10, 2021, a Chinese court found Michael Spavor guilty of espionage. He was sentenced to eleven years in prison. The court also ordered the confiscation of fifty thousand Chinese yuan—roughly equivalent to eight thousand Canadian dollars—and his eventual deportation. The evidence presented at trial remained secret.
Canada's Ambassador to China, Dominic Barton, noticed something about the timing. Spavor's verdict came just one day after a related verdict in another case involving a Canadian, Robert Schellenberg, and both coincided with ongoing proceedings in Meng Wanzhou's case in Vancouver.
It was, Barton suggested, not a coincidence.
March for the Michaels
Back in Canada, frustration mounted. On September 5, 2021, families and supporters of the Two Michaels gathered in Ottawa for what they called the "March for the Michaels." The occasion was grim: it marked the thousandth day of their detention.
About one hundred fifty people walked seven thousand steps through the capital. The number was chosen deliberately—it matched the number of steps Kovrig took each day pacing his prison cell, his only way of maintaining some physical fitness in confinement.
The Release
Nineteen days after that march, everything changed.
On September 24, 2021, after exactly 1,019 days in Chinese detention, Kovrig and Spavor were released. They boarded a plane with Ambassador Barton and flew home to Canada.
The same day, on the other side of the Pacific, Meng Wanzhou walked free in Vancouver. American prosecutors had reached a deferred prosecution agreement—essentially dropping the extradition request in exchange for certain conditions.
The parallel timing was impossible to ignore. And yet, at a press conference three days later, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying insisted the cases were unrelated. The Two Michaels, she claimed, had simply "applied for release on bail for medical reasons."
Few believed her.
The Bitter Aftermath
You might expect that shared ordeal would forge an unbreakable bond between two men who had suffered together. Instead, the opposite happened.
In 2023, Michael Spavor accused Michael Kovrig of something extraordinary: using him as an unwitting intelligence source. According to Spavor, Kovrig had extracted information about North Korea from him during their friendship—information that Kovrig then secretly passed to Canadian intelligence agencies and, through the Five Eyes alliance, to Canada's closest intelligence partners: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
Spavor's accusation suggested that he had never known he was serving as an intelligence asset. He believed his conversations with Kovrig were those of friends and colleagues, not debriefings.
This puts the Chinese espionage charges in a more complicated light. If Spavor was indeed passing intelligence—even unknowingly—then perhaps the Chinese authorities were not entirely wrong about what had been happening, even if their prosecution remained politically motivated.
The Grey Zone
At the center of this controversy sits something called the Global Security Reporting Program, or GSRP. This program operated out of the Canadian embassy in Beijing, and according to investigative reports, Kovrig had been part of it during his diplomatic career.
A watchdog report criticized the GSRP for operating in what it called a "distinctly grey zone"—a space between legitimate diplomatic reporting and something closer to intelligence gathering. The report warned that this ambiguity put both the program's officers and their contacts at risk. It might also, the watchdog suggested, breach global diplomatic conventions.
The Canadian government denied that Kovrig was involved in espionage. Kerry Buck, a retired diplomat and senior fellow at the University of Ottawa, defended the program's legitimacy. GSRP diplomats write diplomatic reports, she explained, and those reports are read by people in Ottawa, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, known as CSIS. But reading a diplomat's report, she argued, doesn't make that diplomat a spy.
The distinction may be clear to diplomats. It was less clear to the Chinese government. And it was apparently invisible to Michael Spavor.
The Settlement
In late 2023, Spavor sought a multimillion-dollar settlement from the Canadian government. His lawyer asked for ten and a half million Canadian dollars. The government initially offered three million each to both Kovrig and Spavor.
In March 2024, Spavor reached a deal: seven million Canadian dollars.
The settlement suggests the Canadian government believed it bore some responsibility for what happened to Spavor—even if it stopped short of admitting that Kovrig had used him for intelligence purposes.
Hostage Diplomacy in the Modern Era
The detention of the Two Michaels illustrated something troubling about modern geopolitics: when great powers clash, ordinary citizens can become collateral.
The practice has a name. Scholars call it "hostage diplomacy"—the detention of foreign nationals to gain leverage in disputes with their home countries. It's a practice as old as statecraft, but in an era of global business travel and international civil society, it has taken on new dimensions. Anyone who works across borders, who builds relationships in countries with different political systems, who moves in spaces between nations, becomes a potential target.
For Canada, a middle power caught between American demands and Chinese retaliation, the episode exposed painful vulnerabilities. The country had honored its treaty obligations to the United States. In return, two of its citizens spent nearly three years in conditions that Canadian officials characterized as arbitrary detention.
The resolution—Meng goes free, the Michaels go free, everyone pretends the cases were unrelated—satisfied no one's sense of justice. It was simply the least bad outcome available.
What Remains Uncertain
Many questions about the Two Michaels affair may never be fully answered.
Was Kovrig an intelligence asset, as the investigative reports suggest? If so, did he cross lines that put Spavor at risk? The Canadian government denies it, but governments rarely acknowledge intelligence operations.
Did Chinese authorities have legitimate concerns about intelligence gathering, or was the entire prosecution manufactured for political leverage? The closed trials and secret evidence make it impossible for outsiders to judge.
And perhaps most troubling: how many other people with connections to North Korea, or China, or other sensitive regions, are operating in similar grey zones—gathering information that governments find valuable, without full awareness of the risks they're taking?
The Two Michaels are home now. Michael Kovrig returned to his family in Toronto. Michael Spavor stayed in Calgary, carrying both his settlement money and his grievances.
Their ordeal is over. The questions it raised are not.