U.S. condemns China’s harsh sentence for a prominent journalist

WASHINGTON – The State Department has denounced a Chinese court’s sentencing of a prominent journalist, Dong Yuyu, to seven years in prison and said it stood with his family in calling for his “immediate and unconditional release.”

A court in Beijing announced the sentence Friday for his conviction on charges of espionage. Dong, 62, a former Harvard University Nieman fellow, has been held since February 2022, when officers from the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency, detained him and a Japanese diplomat while they ate lunch in a restaurant.

The officers released the diplomat after an interrogation, but prosecutors put Dong on trial behind closed doors in July 2023. He is the most prominent journalist imprisoned in mainland China.

Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in a statement Friday that Dong’s “arrest and today’s sentencing highlight the PRC’s failure to live up to its commitments under international law and its own constitutional guarantees to all its citizens.” He used the initials of the formal name of the country, the People’s Republic of China.

“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,” Miller added. “We stand by Dong and his family and call for his immediate and unconditional release.”

R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China and a former Harvard professor, also issued a statement of condemnation, calling the sentencing “unjust.”

Dong’s case could become a bigger flash point under the administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to take a confrontational approach to China. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Trump’s pick for secretary of state, has crafted legislation that would punish China for its human rights abuses. Rubio is a former co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which lists Dong as a prisoner “of priority concern” and urges action on his case by the White House.

Dong was a longtime editor and writer for Guangming Daily, the Communist Party’s leading newspaper for intellectual ideas, but he was not a party member.

Soon after starting at the newspaper, he took part in the 1989 pro-democracy protests, which ended with the military’s killing of hundreds or even thousands of civilians, and was sentenced to a year of hard labor in a steel factory. He returned to his job afterward, and through the decades, he wrote articles and columns on the need for China to embrace more-liberal ideas and be more open to the outside world.

He spent 2006-07 at Harvard as a Nieman fellow, a prestigious appointment for American and international journalists. He later did a fellowship and a visiting professorship in Japan, and also occasionally wrote essays for foreign publications, including the Chinese edition of The New York Times. (I first met Dong and his family on a visit to Harvard and kept in touch with them after I was posted to Beijing for the Times in 2008. I did a Nieman fellowship later, and mentioned Dong’s case in my new book on China.)

Dong’s harsh sentence comes at time of contradictions in the policies of the autocratic Xi Jinping, China’s leader. On the one hand, he has been trying to keep U.S.-China diplomacy stable and is encouraging some foreigners to live and work in China to boost its slowing economy. On the other, he has told Chinese citizens to report potential spies and has empowered his security agencies to arrest so-called subversives, whether justified or not.

Dong’s sentencing appears intended to force a limiting of contacts between Chinese citizens and foreigners. Dong met openly with diplomats from Japan and the United States, as well as with international scholars, journalists and other foreigners.

The judgment read aloud in court Friday accused the Japanese Embassy in Beijing of being an “espionage organization” and named several Japanese diplomats Dong knew, including a former Japanese ambassador and the current chief diplomat in Shanghai, as agents, according to a statement from Dong’s family. The Japanese foreign ministry has said its diplomatic missions engage in “legitimate duties carried out by diplomats.”

Dong’s wife lives in Beijing, and his son lives in Washington, D.C. The son, Yifu Dong, graduated from Yale University and Boston University School of Law. The family plans to appeal the verdict and sentence and said that, in any case, China should release Dong on humanitarian grounds, given his age and a liver condition that has required monitoring during his detention.

They said the sentence was a “grave injustice” to “every free-thinking Chinese journalist and every ordinary Chinese committed to friendly engagement with the world.”

This past week, China and the United States did a prisoner swap in which China released three imprisoned U.S. citizens and several people who had been prevented from leaving China for years under an exit ban.

The National Press Club in Washington has condemned the sentencing of Dong. And his imprisonment could increase tensions between Harvard and Chinese leaders, many of whom want their children to attend the university. Xi’s daughter, Xi Mingze, is a Harvard alumna.

Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, said Dong “is a cherished member of the international Nieman fellows community, where he is known for the care and diligence he has brought to his writing. We stand with many in hoping for a speedy reversal of this harsh decision so he may return to his family as soon as possible.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.