from Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org to world@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 16:02
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45888880
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/45888879
The journalist’s appeal went before Beijing High Court on November 13, with the court determining to uphold the original conviction handed down in November 2024. The journalist’s son, Dong Yifu, said the court had provided no reasoning for rejecting the appeal.
Dong was arrested in February 2022, while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat at a hotel restaurant in Beijing after the XXIV Winter Olympics, which was held in the country that year. According to the court judgement, the diplomat was labelled an ‘agent of an espionage organisation’ and had also been detained for several hours before being released.
Dong remained in pre-trial detention for almost one year, before being charged with espionage in April 2023. He then remained incarcerated until the official hearing in November 2024.
[…]
Before his detainment, Dong worked with the Chinese state-run government newspaper Guangming Daily as a senior columnist for 35 years. He primarily published opinion articles and academic journals about legal reforms on social issues, state corruption and constitutional reform. He was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in 2006 and worked closely with two scholar Japanese universities that he often visited. In 2017, following a state investigation, Dong’s work was allegedly flagged by the Chinese Communist Party as being ‘anti-communist’.
[…]
China is the world’s worst jailer of journalists in the world. In 2024, the IFJ found the state had imprisoned approximately typ135 journalists and media workers for their reporting.
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I think the ICIJ should provide a style guide to writing where countries like China and the US always have the term “court” in quotation marks. Courts are a function of the rule of law. China and the US have no rule of law. Therefore the “court” (their term not mine) has ruled against a journalist doing the things journalists do.
Totally a normal thing that happens in totally not fascist dictatorships.
So he had a paid Nieman fellowship at Harvard to write smear articles against China. I’m sure he wrote purely factual news.
…and? That’s entirely irrelevant.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant that the guy is literally getting paid by Western think tanks and coincidentally writes negative articles against China.
If he was writing negative news about China without any direct financial incentives I would be a lot less skeptical.
I don’t doubt any of that. I also don’t care, because it’s irrelevant to whether or not it’s acceptable that he’s being imprisoned for what he wrote.
Possibly. They arrested him for espionage. His background looks incredibly compromised, but he could just have been a smalltime grifter. This is a pretty clear cut case of someone working for a foreign government though. And the user who posted seems to spend all their time posting every single anti-China article they can find.
Very convincing, do provide evidence I’m getting paid.