O, Canada

By O.A.

THE deportation of Lai Changxing counts as a big victory for Chinese officialdom, which has been trying to get him back for a solid decade. It had always seemed likely that Mr Lai paid huge bribes to people who still hold high office in the state structure; it will be in their interest to ensure that he is somewhere he can't spill the beans.

It is also a great victory for China's government for the extent to which it validates its legal system. Canada and its independent judiciary are in effect saying that the Chinese legal system can be taken at its word. When China says "we won't torture or kill Lai", it now seems that even such high-minded people as Canadian judges are willing to believe them. That in itself is extraordinary. A dozen of Mr Lai's closest confidantes have been executed in China over the years since his case came to light and both his brother and his accountant died in prison in unexplained circumstances. A report published last week counted 72 Chinese billionaires who died of unnatural causes over the past eight years: 14 of them executed by the state. China is frequently criticised for its abusive penal system. How the Chinese lawyers managed to persuade the Canadians that the unpopular Mr Lai can be kept safe is hard to see.

But not impossible. Beijing applied unrelenting pressure for ten years on Canada: withholding visa privileges, scuppering trade deals, snubbing high officials. Canadian officials decided years ago that they could make life much easier for themselves if only they could give China what it wanted. Judges stood in their way until now. Against growing political pressure and ever more clever assurances by Beijing they eventually found reasons of their own to relent.

The guarantees given by Beijing might even be trustworthy. China probably will not kill Mr Lai or at least not very soon (too much publicity). But anyone concerned about reforms in China—and the judiciary is a more likely site for reform than the government proper—will be disappointed. The politicised and abusive Chinese legal system has just been given a seal of approval by one of its most respected and progressive counterparts in the West. That will reinforce the worst kind of complacency in Beijing.