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A veteran Chinese journalist who worked at a ruling Communist Party-affiliated newspaper and was a Harvard University fellow faces espionage charges after being detained while meeting with a Japanese diplomat in a restaurant, his family said Monday.
Dong Yuyu, deputy head of the editorial department at Guangming Daily, regularly met with foreign journalists and diplomats to help understand global trends. But Chinese authorities regarded his contacts with foreign diplomats as evidence of spying, according to a family statement.
Dong is the latest in a series of liberal Chinese voices to be accused by the government of being linked to what it terms foreign interference.
As a non-Communist Party member, he was one of the most pro-reform voices at Guangming Daily and wrote articles in favor of an independent legal system, his family said. He was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in 2006-07 and became a visiting fellow at Keio University in Japan in 2010. Four years later, he served as a visiting professor at Hokkaido University in Japan.
But his writings caused him problems in China. In 2017, an investigation by party authorities found that some of his articles were “anti-socialist” and Dong was threatened with demotion, his family said.
