Australian Yang Hengjun charged with espionage in China

Detained Australian Yang Hengjun has been formally charged with espionage by Chinese prosecutors.

Detained Australian businessman and writer Yang Hengjun has been formally charged with espionage in China.

Detained Australian Yang Hengjun has been formally charged with espionage by Chinese prosecutors.

Mr Yang - a 55-year-old writer and businessman who reportedly worked for China’s security apparatus in the 1990s - was detained by Chinese authorities in January 2019 at Guangzhou Airport after arriving from New York.

The ABC has reported that Mr Yang’s lawyer Shang Baojun confirmed his client was formally charged with “espionage” on October 7. A closed trial could be held in Beijing before the end of the month.

Responding to news of the charge, Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Saturday said that China’s legal system was “very different from the system here in Australia and that can cause some anxiety”.

“We are obviously keen and have been stressing in all our diplomatic engagements around this issue that there should be transparency — there should be a fair and just process — and these are the things that we stand for as Australians,” said Prime Minister Morrison at a news conference.

The charges against the Australian citizen come during a period of extreme tension in the bilateral relationship, which worsened after the Morrison government advocated an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus and Beijing responded with trade reprisals on beef, barley and wine.

Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne said there was no basis for the allegations against the author.

Mr Yang has maintained his innocence, telling family he would “never confess to something I haven’t done”.

Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne has said “there is no basis for any allegation Dr Yang was spying for the Australian Government”.

As well as running an online shopping store, Mr Yang was a prolific writer of political essays, a fraught activity in President Xi Jingping’s increasingly authoritarian China.

Mr Yang also self-published spy fiction, including the novel Fatal Weakness about a US-China double agent.

In March, the ABC reported that Mr Yang previously worked in junior roles in China’s Ministry of State Security, its peak intelligence agency.

“My judgement is that [Yang] engaged in low-level intelligence work, and then slowly broke away from the system,” said former Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin in the ABC’s report.

“Yang Hengjun is a complicated person,” said Mr Chen, who defected to Australia in 2005.

The Australian citizen is being held in a detention facility in Beijing, without access to his family, including his wife Yuan Xiaoliang, a former nationalist blogger who remains in China.

Mr Yang has met his lawyers twice in the past month, his first legal access after 21 months of detention and interrogation by Chinese security authorities.

Consular access via videolink to Australian diplomats was restored in September after being suspended for more than nine months following the coronavirus outbreak.

Feng Chongyi, a friend of Yang’s and professor at the University of Technology Sydney, told Reuters that a judge will within weeks be appointed to hear the case in the Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court.

In August, another Chinese-born Australian citizen, Cheng Lei - a host on Chinese state television - was detained in Beijing.

China’s foreign ministry said the CGTN business anchor is being investigated on suspicion of “endangering national security”, a wide ranging allegation in the country’s opaque legal system.