The United States condemns the People’s Republic of China’s November 29 sentencing of journalist Dong Yuyu to seven years in prison on trumped up charges of espionage. The hearing was conducted under heavy police presence, and the media and a U.S. diplomat were barred from attending.
Dong had served as a deputy head of editorial department at Guangming Daily, a state-owned newspaper in China. He was also published in the Chinese edition of the New York Times. In his writings, Dong expressed support for constitutional democracy and political reform. These ideas did not go over well with the Chinese Communist Party.
Dong had contacts with foreign diplomats, scholars and other journalists through his lengthy career as a reporter.
Dong was arrested back in February 2022 by PRC authorities as he and a Japanese diplomat were dining together at a restaurant. The officers released the diplomat after an interrogation, but prosecutors put Dong on trial behind closed doors in July 2023.
According to Reporters Without Borders, since Chinese President 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 criminalized. ... China falls close to the bottom of [Reporters Without Border’s] 2024 World Press Freedom Index, ranking 172nd out of the 180 countries and territories evaluated.”
U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns condemned Dong’s sentencing in a post on X: “Punishing Dong for exercising his freedom of speech and the press, guaranteed by the PRC’s constitution for all its citizens, is unjust.”
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement Dong’s arrest and sentencing “highlight the PRC’s failure to live up to its commitments under international law and its own constitutional guarantees to all its citizens, which include the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
“We celebrate Dong’s work as a veteran journalist and editor, as well as his contributions to U.S.-PRC people-to-people ties, including as a Harvard University Nieman Fellow,” said Mr. Miller. “We stand by Dong and his family and call for his immediate and unconditional release.”
