China jails journalist for seven years on espionage charges

Dong Yuyu, a former editor at the Guangming Daily, was arrested in 2022 while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat.

A court in China has sentenced journalist Dong Yuyu to seven years in prison on spying charges, according to a statement from his family, who called it a “grave injustice”.

In its verdict on Friday, the Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court deemed the 62-year-old former editor of the Communist Party’s Guangming Daily guilty based on prior meetings with senior Japanese diplomats, his family said.

According to the judgement, the Japanese diplomats Dong met with, including then-ambassador Hideo Tarumi and current Shanghai-based chief diplomat, Masaru Okada, were named as agents of an “espionage organisation”, the statement added.

Police guarded the court on Friday, with seven police cars parked nearby, asking journalists to leave the area.

The sentence based on “no evidence declares to the world the bankruptcy of the justice system in China”, the family statement read.