China is outraged that the US wants to take the arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou off Canada's hands

• Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei's founder, may soon be in US custody, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
• The US will look to make a formal extradition request "within a week" as law-enforcement pursues the top Huawei executive for breaching American sanctions on Iran.
• Meng has been living with her family in Vancouver. Talk of her imminent extradition comes as the ground rules are being prepared for the critical two-way trade war talks between Washington and Beijing.

American officials say they are on track to have Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's CF delivered to the US to stand trial.

Meng was detained at the request of the US while transiting through Vancouver airport on Dec. 1.

"We will continue to pursue the extradition of defendant Ms. Meng Wanzhou, and will meet all deadlines set by the U.S.-Canada Extradition Treaty," Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement to The Times. "We greatly appreciate Canada's continuing support in our mutual efforts to enforce the rule of law."

The US and Canada may not entirely be seeing eye-to-eye on the matter, as Ottawa increasingly finds itself caught between two strident superpowers.

Canada's ambassador to the US, David MacNaughton, told The Globe and Mail on Tuesday that "he has voiced Canadian anger and resentment to the Trump administration about the dispute that resulted from the arrest of Ms. Meng."

While the Americans "are the ones seeking to have the full force of American law brought against" Meng, MacNaughton said, it is Canada that is "paying the price."

China, alert to cracks in any alliance, was quick to respond, demanding that the US retract the request.

China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, among now-routine insinuations of retribution, said Canada's extradition treaty with the US "severely infringes upon the security and legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens."

"Anyone with normal judgment can see that the Canadian side has made a serious mistake on this issue from the very beginning," she said. "The Meng Wanzhou case is obviously not an ordinary judicial case."

Hua accused both Canada and the US of "arbitrarily abusing their bilateral extradition."

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She urged the Canadian side to immediately release Meng and offered a warning to the US.

"We strongly urge the US side to immediately correct its mistake, withdraw its arrest warrant for Ms. Meng Wanzhou and refrain from making formal extradition request to the Canadian side," Hua said during a daily briefing.

The Times highlighted the timing of the extradition request, coming as it does amid the US-China trade dispute.

Led by the top US trade representative and noted China hawk, Robert Lighthizer, the talks next week are another fresh beginning to an increasingly prickly stand-off.

With President Donald Trump staring down a record partial government shutdown and the trade war already causing an unknown but significant amount of economic damage to both nations, the Jan. 30 talks in Washington, have enough riding on them for the negotiators to seek every advantage and leverage every pressure point.

While US officials originally sought to distance the detention and extradition of Meng from broader tensions with China, Trump has pointedly tweeted of his willingness to negotiate.

The US side, often informed by Lighthizer, has come down hard on Huawei and its ambitions to embed its technology into the global heart of next-generation mobile and data networks.

According to The Times, a senior Canadian Foreign Ministry official said Canada fully expects the US to go ahead and extradite Meng so she will face charges of lying to US banks about Huawei's business conduct inside sanctions-addled Iran.