Michael Kovrig reflects on ‘brutally hard’ Chinese detention: ‘You’re totally alone’

Michael Kovrig, who spent 1,019 days in a Chinese prison, has described for the first time the emotional and psychological toll that the detention took on him and his family.

Canadian Michael Kovrig and his girlfriend were walking home from dinner on Dec. 10, 2018.

They lived in Beijing, where Kovrig, a former diplomat, worked at an independent global think tank. As they took the final steps into their apartment, they were swarmed.

“I was grabbed out of the blue by about a dozen men in black. They stuffed me into a car and took me to a secret black jail and then proceeded to interrogate me relentlessly and hold me in solitary confinement,” he told Global News, sharing his story of incarceration and the aftermath.

The sit-down interview comes three years after he was released following 1,019 days in a Chinese detention cell. Kovrig is now sharing his story for the first time, including details of his two-and-a-half-year incarceration and meeting his daughter following his release.

He spoke of finding strength from the letters and cards he received from ordinary Canadians, and he warned Canada and its allies about the need to take foreign interference seriously.

“It’s the confinement and the isolation that are really psychologically, brutally difficult, coupled with an interrogation approach that is really just designed not to extract information because it was obvious from the beginning that they were just looking for something that they could use,” Kovrig said.

“They were trying to crush my spirit and gaslight me and brainwash me into accepting their narrative and confessing to crimes that I’d never committed.”

The ‘Two Michaels’ became known internationally following their arrests by Beijing in 2018 on widely condemned Chinese claims of espionage.