The guy was actually trying to smuggle meth to Australia, so China has actually done Australia a massive favour by stopping those drugs from ending up on Australian streets.
What is not widely reported in the western media is that this was a retrial requested by Schellenberg himself against his original 15 year sentence.
You have to really be interested in this case to find these key facts omitted in more general and mainstream reporting.
Let that sink in for a moment and then look at all the absurd claims by his lawyer that is endlessly repeated in all the mainstream western reporting about how ‘unfair’ the death sentence was since ‘no new evidence was presented’.
If there was nothing new to present, why did he and his client launch an appeal and ask for this very re-trial in the first place?
Also, just how moronic is his lawyer to agree to an appeal with ‘no new evidence’, against a sentence which was positively scandalously light by Chinese drug law standards (the death penalty comes into play with possession of even a pound of illegal drugs, never mind 500), and in the current political climate?
Anyone even remotely familiar with Chinese drug laws would not have been surprised in the least to see the death penalty handed down for a drug case involving so much ‘product’.
Rather than China going out of its way looking for Canadians to apply the screws to, as is all but explicitly claimed by the western media, the facts are that Schellenberg wasn’t smart enough to quit while he was ahead and pretty much served himself up on a platter.
Was this death sentence politically motivated? Almost certainly. Just as the arrest of Huawei’s CFO was blatantly politically motivated in the first place.
The key difference is that while the arrest of Meng is in deep legal murky waters as she was arrested in Canada having broken no Canadian or international laws; in Schellenberg’s case, all China’s judges had to do was apply Chinese law as it would have been originally had Schellenberg been a Chinese citizen.
Personally I think China is seeing a trend developing, with America getting its allies to gang up on China, the recent arrest of another Huawei employee in Poland stands out as a example.
So China is starting to play hardball to demonstrate the very real costs to those governments stupid enough to think messing with China to curry favour with the Americans does not carry consequences.
Cold War 2.0 is on, and if people are too proud or dense to remember, they will learn the key lessons of the first Cold War first hand - the big boys don’t fight each other directly, they spank each other’s cat paws and minions.
If you are not a superpower, picking sides and taking direct action against a superpower is just sheer idiocy.
That’s why Vietnam and the Philippines got in line so quickly after China showed them it was not playing around in the SCS, when they realised what kind of game they were really playing in.