[Yang Hengjun has been shackled, cut off from all
contact with his family and interrogated daily to make him confess to being a
spy, his representatives said.]
By Damien Cave
 |
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Yang Hengjun with his
wife, Yuan Xiaoliang. He was detained in January on a trip
to China.Credit...Chongyi
Feng, via Associated Press
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SYDNEY,
Australia — Chinese
officials have cut off all contact between a detained Australian writer and
democracy activist, Yang Hengjun, and his family, in what his lawyers described
on Sunday as an effort to “break” Mr. Yang and force him to confess to being a
spy.
Mr. Yang, who was detained in January after
arriving in Guangzhou, China, on a flight from New York, has consistently
denied the charge.
Mr. Yang’s lawyers said they had confirmed
that Chinese officials were conducting daily interrogations of him in
isolation, shackling his ankles and wrists, refusing to allow access to any
messages of support from relatives or friends and giving him at least nine
pills a day for supposed health problems like high blood pressure and kidney
complications.
“We’re concerned because he went in as a fit
and healthy man,” Sarah Condon, one of his lawyers in Melbourne, Australia,
said in an interview. “Now he has this purported diagnosis and is being fed a
concoction of drugs.”
Mr. Yang’s case has already complicated
relations between Australia and China, but the latest accusations added yet
another obstacle to easing any tensions. The Australian government is under
pressure to respond more forcefully to Beijing after intelligence officials
confirmed last week that they were investigating an alleged Chinese plot to
install a spy in the Australian Parliament.
It is not clear if the attention to Beijing’s
covert efforts in Australia — which Chinese officials have denied as pure
hysteria — have affected Mr. Yang’s treatment. The office of Australia’s
foreign minister, Marise Payne, who has been deeply engaged with the case,
could not be reached Sunday night for comment.
But what Mr. Yang’s lawyers described
appeared to be an all-out attempt to persuade him to confess to a charge of
espionage that has not been detailed or explained. The Chinese officials appear
to be trying to make him believe that his case is hopeless and that Australia
has forsaken him.
In August, Mr. Yang said that one of his
Chinese interrogators had told him that Australia was small and would not care
about him because he is not white and because the country was dependent on
China for its trade and economy.
He rejected that assertion, according to his
lawyers, in part because he knew of Australia’s efforts to help through the
snippets of information passed on through official channels. Now those avenues
appear to have been cut off.
“There is a plain attempt to have Mr. Yang be
subjected to interrogation in complete isolation, cut off entirely from his
loved ones and supporters,” said Robert Stary, another of his defense lawyers.
Mr. Yang is one of many writers and activists
who over the years have run afoul of the Chinese authorities and disappeared
into detention. He is one of a few people with foreign citizenship to be
detained indefinitely over the past year or so. In December 2018, the Chinese
police detained two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, as officials
in Beijing pressed Canada to free Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive held for
possible extradition to the United States on fraud charges.
The motivation for Mr. Yang’s arrest is
harder to untangle.
He worked for the Chinese Foreign Ministry
before setting out as a novelist and commentator, moving to Hong Kong, the
United States and, finally, Australia, where he studied for a Ph.D. and became
an Australian citizen in 2002.
After migrating, he remained an influential
voice in China, using his online presence to sell health supplements and to
offer lectures, commentaries on current affairs and advice on migration to
Western countries.
While he has often stayed within the bounds
of official Chinese acceptance, he has also issued barbed critiques in playful
tones.
“I’m like an old auntie jabbering on, always
promoting democracy and repeating its benefits,” he wrote in a 2014 article.
Before his detention in January, he spent two
years with his family in New York, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia
University.
@ The New York Times