China: prominent journalist Dong Yuyu sentenced to prison on bogus espionage charges
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the release of Dong Yuyu, a prominent Chinese journalist sentenced to seven years in prison on trumped-up accusations of espionage. He is one of 123 journalists and press freedom defenders currently detained by the Chinese regime.
On Friday, 29 November 2024, Beijing’s No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Dong Yuyu, deputy editor and columnist at the state-run Guangming Daily and contributor to The New York Times, to seven years in prison. The hearing was conducted under heavy police presence, and the media and a US diplomat were barred from attending.
The sentence followed a closed-door trial completed in July 2023, during which Dong, who is now 62, was found guilty of “espionage”. The only evidence presented by the Chinese regime in support of this accusation was the journalist’s contact with foreign diplomats and the scholarships he obtained from foreign universities.
“Maintaining relationships with foreign diplomats and academics is a normal part of a journalist’s work, and labelling these connections as espionage is just absurd. We call on the international community to step up pressure on the Chinese regime to free Dong Yuyu and the 122 other journalists and press freedom defenders currently detained in the country.
Dong was arrested in February 2022 by police at a Beijing hotel while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat, and was held incommunicado for six months before being formally charged. Dong joined the Guangming Daily in 1987 and rose through the ranks, earning journalism awards for his reporting on topics such as corruption and other social issues. In 2017, he was threatened with demotion after a party investigation deemed his writing “anti-socialist.”
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he has reinstated a media culture reminiscent of the Maoist era, where seeking information or sharing it freely is criminalised. RSF’s report, The Great Leap Backwards of Journalism in China, details the regime’s extensive efforts to control media outlets and information, both domestically and internationally.
China falls close to the bottom of RSF’s 2024 World Press Freedom Index, ranking 172nd out of the 180 countries and territories evaluated.
