A little more than a year ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was traveling to Beijing, hoping for a free trade deal. How things have changed. Since Canada carried out an American warrant and arrested Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in the Vancouver airport last month, Canada seems to have become enemy No. 1 of the Chinese government. The price has been steep for three Canadians in particular: Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, both detained in China and accused of threatening national security, as well as Robert Schellenberg, who was hastily retried this week for drug smuggling. His original sentence of 15 years in prison was replaced with the death penalty.

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In Canada, the sentence has been viewed as a kind of international ransom. But I wondered how the détente has been perceived in China. I reached out to my colleague Chris Buckley. An Australian by birth, Chris has lived in China for more than two decades and studied Chinese Communist Party history at Renmin University in Beijing. He joined The Times in 2012.