Earlier this year Spavor was sentenced to 11 years in prison; Kovrig’s sentence was pending as of when he was released.

From the American side, suspicions about Huawei remain – the US attorney in Brooklyn said that while the prosecution of Meng had been deferred, the fraud case against the company continues – as does a belief that China may be emboldened by the tough strategy it took in the Meng affair.

Beijing has characterised Meng’s detention as part of an effort by Washington to halt Huawei’s rapid accumulation of global market share in the mobile telecoms industry and Ottawa’s involvement in the case as compliance in this campaign.

Chinese officials have also dismissed the US case that Meng misled lender HSBC in a way that caused the bank to violate US sanctions against Iran. On Friday, Meng did not plead guilty to the charges but, as part of the agreement, admitted to providing “knowingly false statements”.

“Meng’s release on its own will not lower temperatures in US-China relations; it may even raise them as China claims victory over a wrongful prosecution,” Daly said.

“Neither China nor the United States seems to have made concessions in the handling of the case,” he added. “Beijing will see Meng’s return as a vindication of hostage diplomacy; the key question for Canadians and the rest of the world will be what to make of China’s ready and ongoing embrace of that strategy.”

Ethan Paul, a research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based think tank, noted that the Meng agreement was the first move the Biden administration had made on any of the items included in the “two lists” Chinese foreign vice-minister Xie Feng presented to US deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman in July.

Paul said top Chinese officials repeatedly emphasised that those lists represented Beijing’s core negotiating position.

However, he added that “we should not lose sight of the fact that the Biden administration has firmly planted its flag on competition with China as the defining feature of its foreign policy post-Afghanistan”, Paul said.

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“The Biden administration will continue to sanction Huawei, and China will still feel bullied by Meng’s arrest,” Segal said. “The mistrust remains, especially around technology.”

The US government has placed Huawei, China’s tech giant, on the Commerce Department’s Entity List since 2019, barring any American supplier from selling products to Huawei, which the US contends has ties with the Chinese government.

That charge started soon after news of the agreement broke on Friday.

“Meng Wanzhou violated US sanctions, but the Biden administration chose to appease the Chinese Communist Party rather than enforcing the law,” Senator Tom Cottonl the Arkansas Republican who is a vocal China critic, said in a statement. “Instead of standing firm against China’s hostage-taking and blackmail, President Biden folded.

“This surrender only encourages the Communists in Beijing to take more Americans and our allies hostage in the future.”

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Florida’s Marco Rubio, another Senate Republican who has made hard-line positions against China one of his key policy objectives, piled on.

“The release of Ms. Meng raises serious questions about President Biden’s ability and willingness to confront the threat posed by Huawei and the Chinese Communist Party,” he said in a statement issued on Saturday. “We have already seen how the administration’s single-minded focus on climate is causing them to downplay genocide.

“This is just another example of the Biden Administration’s dangerously soft approach towards Beijing,” he added.