China’s arrest of an Australian spy novelist and blogger raises fears of more «hostage diplomacy,» reprisals for actions against tech giant Huawei,
China confirmed Thursday it had arrested prominent Australian writer and blogger Yang Hengjun on suspicion of endangering national security, the identical accusation used in the recent detention of two Canadian citizens.
The arrest came after Australia criticized China for detaining the Canadians and heightened suspicions that Yang was taken into custody in retaliation for the arrest of the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei.
Yang, a prominent novelist and former Chinese diplomat who gave up his nationality and moved to Australia, disappeared Friday after flying from New York — where he is a visiting scholar at Columbia University — to Guangzhou in southern China. He was detained before he could catch a connecting flight to Shanghai, where he was to meet up with his wife and child. He stopped posting on social media, and for four days his whereabouts were unknown.
Rory Medcalf, a former Australian diplomat now at the Australian National University in Canberra, described Yang’s arrest as “hostage diplomacy” and linked it to the arrests of the two Canadians — Michael Kovrig, an analyst with International Crisis Group, and Michael Spavor, a businessman who runs a travel company in China arranging trips to North Korea.
Those arrests came after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company’s founder and one of China’s leading tech billionaires, was detained in Canada at the request of the U. S. and as the U. S.-China trade war was deepening.
Yang’s arrest now “drags Australia into China’s hostage diplomacy,” Medcalf said in a tweet.
“I think… it’s a signal that we are now — not only Australia, but really all democracies, all middle powers — in for a period of sustained tension with China, where the safety of our nationals in China simply cannot be assured,” he said in an interview on Australian radio.
