A Beijing court on Monday handed Australian writer Yang Hengjun a suspended death sentence, threatening a recent rebound in bilateral ties that followed several years of strained relations between Beijing and Canberra.
The sentence, handed down five years after Yang was detained in China and three years after his closed-door trial on espionage charges, shocked his family and supporters.
Yang, a pro-democracy blogger, is an Australian citizen born in China who was working in New York before his arrest at Guangzhou airport in 2019. He had been accused of spying for a country China has not publicly identified and the details of the case against him have not been made public.
Sydney-based scholar Feng Chongyi said a court on Monday delivered a suspended death sentence that would convert to life imprisonment after two years.
It was a “serious case of injustice”, he said, adding that Yang had denied the charges.
“He is punished by the Chinese government for his criticism of human rights abuses in China and his advocacy for universal values such as human rights, democracy and rule of law,” he said.
He urged the Australian government to seek medical parole for Yang, saying five years of detention had taken a heavy toll on his health.
Yang’s sentence was confirmed by another human rights lawyer in Beijing who has been following his case.
“He was found guilty of all charges,” the lawyer said, asking to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Australia is “appalled” at the court’s decision and has called in China’s ambassador, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Monday.
Wong said in a statement on Monday the Australian government understood the sentence can be commuted to life imprisonment after two years if the individual does not commit any serious crimes in that period.
“This is harrowing news for Dr Yang, his family and all who have supported him,” she said.
Yang’s family was “shocked and devastated by this news, which comes at the extreme end of worst expectations”, said a family spokesman in Sydney.
His two sons, who live in Australia, wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in October on the eve of his visit to Beijing, urging him to seek Yang’s release on medical grounds.
His supporters have argued Yang should be released on medical parole after he was told last year he had a 10 cm (4 inch) cyst on his kidney that may require surgery.
Australia had said it was troubled by repeated delays in Yang’s case, and had advocated for his well-being, including access to medical treatment, “at the highest levels”.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
A Beijing court heard Yang’s trial in secret in May 2021 and the case against him has never been publicly disclosed. He has denied working as a spy for Australia or the United States.
In letters to family and supporters from jail, Yang has denied any wrongdoing.
Yang wrote about Chinese and U.S. politics as a high-profile blogger. He was living in New York in 2019 as a visiting scholar at Columbia University who supplemented his income by working as a “daigou” or online shopping agent for Chinese consumers seeking American products.
He was arrested while visiting China in January 2019, accompanied by his wife.
Yang had been detained in China for a short period once before, in 2011, on suspicion of links to online democracy activists. He was released after a few days following interventions by the Australian government.
At the time, he wrote to Feng to say he had worked for China’s Ministry of State Security for a decade starting in 1989, including in Hong Kong and Washington, before quitting and moving to Australia, Feng had told Reuters.
Yang migrated to Australia in 1999 and became an Australian citizen in 2002, undertaking PhD studies at Sydney’s University of Technology in 2006, where Feng was his supervisor.
Yang spent the next four years writing spy novels, published in Taiwan, about a double agent, also surnamed Yang.
Yang was detained as Australia-China ties deteriorated in 2019. But hopes of his release had been raised by the release of Australian broadcaster Cheng Lei shortly before Albanese visited China last year.
“The verdict casts a shadow over bilateral ties and will for some time, as it acts as a potent reminder of the opacity of the Chinese system and its imperviousness to reasonable foreign complaints,” said Richard McGregor, senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, said that Beijing had said it wanted to move beyond the stabilisation of ties with Australia, but that the sentence would make a thaw harder.
“This decision makes it extremely difficult for the Albanese government to do so in terms of managing the domestic politics. The strong language already used by foreign minister makes plain their disappointment,” he said.
Elaine Pearson, who heads Human Rights Watch in Asia, said the sentence was “outrageous”, and called on the Australian government to work “with other governments that also have their citizens arbitrarily detained” including Canada, Japan and the United States
