Protester burns Chinese flag outside Huawei CFO's court hearing
07 March, 2019
He'd been wanting to do it for a long time.
So, outside the British Columbia Supreme Court complex in Vancouver, where Huawei Technologies CFO Meng Wanzhou was facing a judge as part of her extradition process, Yang Kuang pulled out a Chinese flag on the broken tip of a fishing rod and set it on fire.
A phalanx of photographers and film crews captured the moment on a chilly Wednesday morning.
A string of Meng's court appearances since her December 1 arrest at Vancouver's international airport (at the US' request) have attracted crowds of protesters and rubberneckers.
At her December bail hearings, the demonstrators were almost all pro-Meng and pro-Huawei, decrying her detention as a political pursuit by the US, aided and abetted by Canadian lackeys. "Free Meng", and "We love you Huawei", had read the placards waved by a mostly Mandarin-speaking crowd, some waving Chinese flags.
The protests mirrored Beijing's unabated fury at Meng's arrest to face US criminal charges of bank fraud, conspiracy and obstruction related to alleged breaches of US sanctions on Iran.
But on Wednesday a different scene was unfolding.
There were knots of pro-Meng protesters, but others were waving posters of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, the two Canadians who have been detained by China and accused of working together to steal state secrets.
"Boycott Huawei" read one banner. "Extradite Meng", and "Release Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig", read others.
The spoken language of choice was Cantonese (although a handful of white protesters were on hand too). The flags of choice were Canadian.
Except Yang's, of course.
A well-known activist in Hong Kong, Yang was jailed for eight months in Shenzhen in 2014 for illegally crossing into mainland China, a sentence his family said was politically motivated.
Yang had previously made headlines in 2012 by captaining a boat that landed a party of activists on the disputed Diaoyu Islands, which Japan calls the Senkaku Islands. Then in 2013, Yang was arrested in Beijing for "provoking quarrels" while trying to visit the wife of jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo; Yang was sent back to Hong Kong.
He was accepted as a political refugee in Canada in 2015, and now lives in Surrey, outside Vancouver.
Yang said he was angered by the "unreasonable tactics" used by Beijing to deal with Meng's arrest, namely, detaining Spavor and Kovrig.
"The Canadian government actually used a legal procedure to extradite her to the US," Yang said, in Cantonese.
"But the Chinese arrested two Canadians using a hostage-taking tactic ? 'you arrest my people, I'll arrest yours'. I feel that that is extremely unreasonable. So when I found out that there would be protesters here, I came along to protest with them."
The combustion of the Chinese flag was hardly spontaneous: Yang came prepared with his fishing rod to keep the flames at a safe distance, a foil roasting pan to catch the ashes and a jug of water, in case things got out of hand.
"I have wished to do that for a very long time," he said. "So burning the flag was to fulfil that wish and to tell people that I am very displeased with everything that the Chinese government has done and to protest against its crackdown on human rights."
After Yang's incendiary moment, the ponytailed protester loaded up his equipment in a backpack and sauntered down Nelson Street, a gaggle of curious teenagers in school uniforms trailing behind him.
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