Canada-China Relations

Two Chinese courts in the Guangdong province have sentenced two Canadian citizens to death in two days.

The Canadian Xu Weihong had been tried in front of the Guangzhou Municipal Intermediate Court, while the now sentenced Ye Jianhui had been tried in front of the Foshan Municipal Intermediate Court for the manufacturing and transportation of drugs.

The police had previously seized around 218 kilograms of MDMA in the form of white crystals from a room that had been used by Ye Jianhui and Lu Hanchang. The latter one has been sentenced to jail time together with three other people involved in the operation. They received between seven years and a life sentence.

In total, four Canadian citizens have been sentenced to death in the past two years.

British Columbia's Supreme Court in Vancouver allowed the process for extraditing Meng Wanzhou to the US to continue. The US wants Meng, Huawei's CFO, to stand trial on charges linked to the alleged violation of US sanctions against Iran.

Although Canada and the US have an extradition treaty, Canadian laws only allow extradition if the charges against the person in question would also qualify as a crime on Canadian soil.

Following the ruling, a Chinese embassy spokesperson in Canada told CBC News: "The purpose of the United States is to bring down Huawei and other Chinese high-tech companies, and Canada has been acting in the process as an accomplice of the United States. The whole case is entirely a grave political incident."