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On September 24, local time, Ms Meng Wanzhou, CFO of HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD, returned to her motherland on a plane chartered by the Chinese government to reunite with her family.
Her 1,028-day arbitrary detention in Canada was brought to an end after unremitting efforts by the Chinese government. Upon her landing in China, Ms Meng said affectionately, “Where there is a five-star red flag, there is a beacon of faith. If faith has color, it must be Chinese red!”
Her ordeal started on December 1, 2018 when the US decided to prey on innocent individuals for its geopolitical game. On that day, the Canadian authorities arrested Ms Meng at Vancouver Airport at the request of the United States when she was transiting in the country. It was at the height of the US-China trade war; the US was starting to go after Chinese high-tech companies.
That arrest and the charges followed were a blatant witch hunt, a political conspiracy by the great powers that recklessly endangered civilians and global business travel. Ms Meng and Huawei have since engaged in a marathon legal battle with the Canadian government which managed the fake legal dispute in sync with the master anti-China plan being executed by Washington. And the rest of the Western world was complicit in their silence.
It is the long arm jurisdiction, a US invention, that gives the super power the excuse to police the world, arresting foreign citizens and imposing sanctions on other countries. The term is generally understood as the ability of US local courts to bring into their jurisdiction cases that do not originally fall within their jurisdiction.
The US’s most lethal weapon in the exercise of long arm jurisdiction is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which says “If a foreigner or foreign company pays a bribe to a foreign country “directly or through an intermediary,” the FCPA has jurisdiction over the case as long as the payment takes place in the US territory.
Under the DOJ’s judicial interpretation, the law can be extended to foreign suspects in certain circumstances. With the world’s most powerful financial sector, the US handles almost all transnational commercial payments through its banks and their financial infrastructures all over the world. This allows the DOJ to stretch its arm long enough to impose its domestic laws on the whole world.
Scratching beneath the thin legal veener of long-arm jurisdiction, one sees naked hegemonism and power politics. First, it enables the US to trample international law and the jurisdictional sovereignty and judicial independence of other countries. Second, with foreign companies, especially those who are on a par with US multinationals, being the only targets of its “global enforcement”, it disadvantages foreign competitors to keep the US from being challenged in its leading position.
For example, the US government, while restricting all foreign enterprises’ transactions with Cuba, gives AT&T the green light to do the exact same thing. Third, such a power of extraterritorial jurisdiction, though dressed as independent and lawful, is in fact manipulated and abused by the government as a bargaining chip in political negotiations and wrangling. Despite claims of judicial independence, in many cases it is not the court that is exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, but the executive branch, as in the cases of Ms Meng Wanzhou’s and Alstom, whereby arrests of foreign corporate executives were done by the administrative authority. In another example, the various measures of section 301 investigation and diplomatic moves by the US-led “Five Eyes Alliance” against Huawei are far beyond reasonable judicial procedures.
The US, by virtue of its centrality in the global trading and financial systems, also threatens the world with sanctions. It interrupts the supply and capital chains of foreign entities with direct sanctions and force transnational companies and financial institutions to comply with the sanctions, which further amplifies the effect of the punitive measures.
Long before Ms Meng was detained, the US had been abusing “long-arm jurisdiction” in attacks of foreign companies, which were invariably strong competitors to the American companies in their own fields.
With a combination of measures that usually include pressure and sanctions, the US administrations managed to damage or acquire these competitors to protect its corporate interests. A most famous case was the arrest of Frederic Pijerucci, a former senior executive of Alstom, a global leader of boiler manufacturing which is a strategic industry in France. The company was known as the world’s top three energy giants together with General Electric and Siemens. On April 14, 2013, Frederic Pierucci, the global head of Alstom’s boiler division, was arrested by FBI agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
This was preceded by the DOJ opening an anti-corruption investigation against Alstom and demanding the company’s cooperation. Pierucci later found out he was not arrested for his own violations of law, but for a bigger plan to dismember his company.
Eventually, Alstom’s power business was acquired by GE, its main rival in the industry. Pierucci was not released from prison until September 2018. After his incarceration ended, Pierucci wrote The American Trap, a bestseller that exposes the evil tactics employed by the US government for unfair competition. The book has been on the desk of Mr Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder, since the Meng incident, and on the shelves throughout the company’s compound. “I hope Huawei is not the next Alstom,” Pierucci once said.
Although the US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the Biden administration would take further action against Chinese telecoms firm Huawei Technologies if necessary, Ms Meng has been brought back home by the Chinese government. “This is the first time that a country has successfully fought back against the long-arm jurisdiction of the United States with its will. I’m not as lucky as Ms Meng. My company and my country don’t have such strong support.” lamented Pierucci, “Deep down, everyone should be happy with this outcome. Because this is really the first time a country has hit back at the crazy long-arm jurisdiction of the United States. This will benefit many other countries if they have the courage to do the same and stand up to the US. For the future, this will hopefully be a historic turning point.”
Online Reporter