DONG Yuyu

A writer and journalist, Dong Yuyu is currently serving a seven-year prison term after conviction of ‘espionage’. Police initially detained Dong on 21 February 2022 at a hotel in Beijing while he was having lunch with a Japanese diplomat, who was also briefly detained. On 23 March 2023, authorities informed Dong’s family that his case had been sent to court for trial on charges of ‘espionage’; the hearing was reported to have taken place in late July 2023 (see Case List 2023/2024). On 29 November 2024, Dong Yuyu was convicted of ‘espionage’ and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. His family have yet to receive the verdict and have raised serious concerns over the basis for the conviction. 

Dong’s family have been denied contact with him for the duration of his detention and he has only been granted limited meetings with his lawyer. For the first six months of his detention, he was held in ‘residential surveillance at a designated location,’ a form of detention which United Nations human rights experts have described as ‘tantamount to enforced disappearance’. 

Dong Yuyu, born on 21 April 1962, is a writer and journalist. Before his arrest, he was the deputy head of the editorial department for Guangming Daily, a state-owned newspaper, where he had worked since 1987. In 1998, he co-edited the book Political China: Facing an Era of Choices for a New System, which contained essays contributed by liberal scholars about judicial independence. In addition to his writing for Guangming Daily, he had written columns for The New York Times Chinese website from 2012-2014, including the essay ‘I want to send my son to study in the United States‘ which continues to circulate on Chinese media. Another essay of his, the book review ‘Viewing the Cultural Revolution from the Perspective of National Politics,’ later led to Dong being labelled as ‘anti-socialist’ in 2017.