China sentences journalist to seven years in prison on espionage charges: Family

BEIJING: A Beijing court sentenced veteran Chinese state media journalist Dong Yuyu to seven years in prison on espionage charges on Friday (Nov 29), his family said.

Dong Yuyu, a senior columnist at the Communist Party newspaper Guangming Daily, was detained at a restaurant in Beijing along with a Japanese diplomat in February 2022.

The diplomat was released after several hours of interrogation, but Dong, 62, has been in custody ever since and was charged with espionage last year.

“The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court found Yuyu guilty of espionage, a crime that requires the prosecution to prove that the defendant knowingly acted on behalf of ‘espionage organizations’ and their agents,” his family said in a statement shared with AFP. The statement was included.

According to the decision, it was stated that among the Japanese diplomats Dong met, then-ambassador Hideo Tarumi and current Shanghai-based chief diplomat Masaru Okada were agents of the “espionage organization”.

“We were shocked that Chinese officials openly recognized the foreign embassy as an ‘espionage organization’ and accused the former Japanese ambassador and his fellow diplomats of being spies.”