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China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as prime minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing.

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Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived after the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou.

That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians – Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig – on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory.

Then in January 2019 a court in north-east China retried Schellenberg – who was 36 at the time – sentencing him to death while declaring that his 15-year prison term for drug trafficking had been too lenient.

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The court said he had been a central player in a scheme to ship narcotics to Australia, in a one-day retrial that Amnesty International called “a flagrant violation of international law”.

Schellenberg has denied wrongdoing.

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