Yang Hengjun and China’s Ever-Moving Red Lines

On January 19, 2019, Australian citizen Yang Hengjun was detained in Beijing. He had flown into Guangzhou from New York City, where he was working as a researcher at Columbia University. Yang was detained on suspicion of espionage, according to his lawyer, and is believed to be under “residential surveillance at a designated location” (RSDL).

Michael Caster, who edited a volume of first-hand accounts from RSDL survivors, explained this particular form of detention in a previous interview with The Diplomat. RSDL he said, is “quintessentially totalitarian… a tool of repression, designed to terrorize and demonstrate power. It is so feared because it was designed to be feared.”

“Torture,” Caster added, “is common.”

Come July 19, Yang will have been detained at an undisclosed location, with minimal access to Australian consular officials – and reportedly no access to his chosen lawyer or family members – for six months. Reports emerged in April that he was being subjected to sleep deprivation and stress positioning, in addition to being kept in a windowless room where the lights are on 24 hours a day. Yet Yang’s case has received little attention overseas, or even in Australia, especially compared to the similar plights of two Canadians arrested around the same time (ostensibly in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Huawei executive).

It’s ironic that Yang – who first made a name for himself through spy novels published online – is now detained for charges of espionage. Yang claimed that he had been recruited by foreign powers to spy on China, but that he had refused, because he had no interest in betraying his country. As with many of Yang’s more colorful stories, there was no way to verify these claims.

I heard these stories from Yang himself. We met in 2014 at a conference in Washington, D.C. A few weeks later I recruited Yang to write for The Diplomat, in a fashion – we would work together to select Chinese-language blog pieces that had been posted to his personal website for English-language translation and publication on The Diplomat’s site. For years – starting from the relatively open period of the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, well after Xi Jinping came to power – Yang wrote blog pieces about Chinese society and politics. A sampling of those pieces, just a small fraction of his total output, was published by The Diplomat from 2014 to 2016.

Many of Yang’s articles walked a careful line between advocating for reform and making it abundantly clear he was not calling for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a hedging game familiar to many Chinese activists. Often Yang framed posts recommending a particular reform by arguing that the proposed change was in line with Xi’s own public statements. Other articles weren’t explicitly about China at all, but explained some detail of a foreign (usually American or Australian) political system that Yang found fascinating or admirable. In other words, even while arguing for political reforms and championing democracy, Yang was cautious not to cross the invisible line that would get him put on a CCP blacklist.

And for years, that kept him safe – until it didn’t.

Yang’s detention is an example of how the Chinese government’s “red line” has been moving, closing off territory that was previously safe. This is an ongoing process; the strictness of China’s censorship has ebbed and flowed ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The current round of tightening burst into the global spotlight with the “709 crackdown” on Chinese lawyers in July 2015. Over 200 rights-focused lawyers across the country, all of whom had been practicing openly for years, were suddenly detained, questioned, and had their offices raided or even shut down. It was clear then that the CCP under Xi was setting a new standard for the “acceptable” limits of criticizing China’s current legal, political, and social systems – and those limits were appallingly narrow.

Just two months before the “709 crackdown,” a small group of Chinese academics gathered in Vancouver, Canada in what was billed as a forum for “interpreting China’s new political direction.” The group included Yang Hengjun and a number of other prominent Chinese advocates for political and/or economic reforms: Feng Chongyi, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney who has often criticized China’s government and human rights record; Mao Yushi, a famed liberal economist and outspoken critic of the CCP; Zhang Qianfan, a constitutional law professor and advocate for constitutionalism in China; and Xin Lijian, founder of the Xinfu Education Group and a well-known social media commenter, among other attendees.

I was also there, the lone non-Chinese, having been invited by Yang to listen in on the discussions and meet some of China’s prominent liberal voices.

Considering that the group chose to hold their event in Vancouver so they could speak more freely, the conversation was remarkably tame. The most heated discussion came when several scholars argued that China must reform its land ownership policy in order to continue the process of economic opening. The most daring thing I heard was when one scholar mentioned to me, in the context of criticizing China’s state-dominated economic system, “We don’t like Mao [Zedong] very much.” This was no clandestine cabal plotting the overthrow of the CCP – it was a group of liberal scholars highly cognizant of the reality of China’s system, debating ways to advance small-scale reforms within that system.

Four years later, many of the attendees – including Yang -- have found even that sort of calculated debate is enough to land them on a CCP target list.

Xin Lijian was detained in August 2015, just months after the Vancouver meeting. He was held for nearly two years before being given a suspended sentence of two and a half years in prison for tax evasion and other accounting crimes. But the real cause of his arrest, many suspect, was his support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Mao Yushi, who remains a prominent figure overseas, has been spared the harshest treatment. However, even he has faced increased censorship; his website was removed by Chinese authorities in 2017. Unirule, a think tank founded by Mao in 1993 to discuss economic deregulation and other reforms, was locked out of its own offices in May this year. Last fall, three Unirule scholars were blocked from leaving the country to attend a Harvard symposium on 40 years of “reform and opening up” in China.

Zhang Qianfan’s law textbook was reportedly banned in China in February 2019, supposedly for “promoting Western thinking.”

Feng Chongyi, a permanent resident of Australia, was barred from leaving China for over a week in 2017, during which he was questioned daily about his human rights research. Feng was later released after a loud international outcry.

Yang, thus far, has not been so lucky.

Yang thought his careful approach was enough to keep him safe. He had purposefully phased out his blogging, especially on political topics, over the past three years. (We ended his arrangement with The Diplomat in 2016 as his articles became less and less frequent, although he and I stayed in touch.) Ultimately, though, in Xi’s “New Era” those precautions were not enough.

Feng told the Associated Press that he had warned Yang Hengjun not to travel to China again, but to no avail. “I told him the situation had changed. He didn’t believe me. It was a horrible misjudgment,” Feng said. And so China’s ever-changing red lines claimed yet another victim.