Australian writer silenced by China arrest

It has been one week since Australian citizen and peddler of democracy’ blogger Yang Hengjun last tweeted.

Yang Hengjun.

It has been one week since Aus­tralian citizen and “peddler of democracy” blogger Yang Hengjun — the author of a series of spy novels — last tweeted.

The writer and former Chinese Foreign Ministry official has established a loyal social media following of more than 131,000 people but most Australians are learning his name for the first time only after he was detained in China this week.

The well-travelled author was born in Hubei Province in 1965 and graduated in law from Shanghai’s blue chip Fudan University.

He moved nearly 1200km north to Beijing to begin his diplomatic career, and spent much of his time accompanying provincial-level officials on overseas trips. At the start of the millennium, Yang clearly wanted a change and chose Australia as his new home, where he followed his dream of writing detective novels.

The first in his trilogy and China’s first espionage novel, Fatal Weakness, tells the story of a US-China double agent who ultimately works for neither side but serves his own agenda, precipitating a US-China conflict.

Much of the material in the novels is said to have been gathered from his time at the foreign ministry, which his friends believed was the reason for his first detention in China in 2011 for ­allegedly divulging state secrets.

Yang had lived in Australia with his wife and two sons in Sydney — all of them Australian citizens — but that marriage broke down. After self-publishing his trilogy, Yang enrolled at the University of Technology Sydney in 2005 to begin his PhD. His ­thesis was titled The Internet and China’s Future.

The outspoken commentator has used his blog to promote democracy in China and gives popular online seminars, earning him the nickname “peddler of democracy”.

He has also become an internet sales person, selling foreign products into his birth country.

In another professional accomplishment, Yang was made a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York in 2016.

His new wife and stepdaughter, who are not Australian citizens, followed him to the US shortly ­afterwards and the trio had been living there until last week.

Friends say the visas of Yang’s wife and stepdaughter were due to expire so they travelled to China to wait for their Australian visas to come through.

A source told The Australian Yang was detained by a squad of 10 security agents as he waited in a queue at Guangzhou airport.