Ministry of State Security sends message to would-be pro-democracy activists
Yang and his wife
HAMISH MCDONALD
SYDNEY -- China's Ministry of
State Security, with an estimated staff of 110,000, is perhaps the world's
biggest intelligence service, but one of the least known to outsiders and
certainly not imbued with popular espionage legends like its Western
counterparts.
Around 20 years ago, Yang Hengjun
set out to remedy that with a set of three novels about undercover battles
between the MSS and the CIA, spiced with sex, mayhem and high-level corruption.
Published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, readers across China were avid readers of
smuggled copies.
MSS cadres, who like to be known
as pillars of communist rectitude, appear not to have appreciated Yang’s
efforts to make them glamorous, or at least not for long. Five years ago, the
agency arrested Yang when he landed in Guangzhou from New York for a family
visit.
Since then he has endured
solitary confinement, hundreds of interrogation sessions and a secret trial for
espionage. This week, judges delivered a death sentence, suspended for two
years and commutable to life imprisonment if he doesn’t somehow re-offend from
his prison cell in that time.
The harsh sentence came as s
shock in Canberra particularly. Yang migratedto Australia in 1999 and became an
Australian citizen. Relations with China later took an upward turn after the
Australian labor Party won power in May 2022. Yang’s release after being
sentence to time served was widely expected.
To Canberra’s China hawks, it
means Beijing wants Australians to be a bit afraid. And the two years of good
behavior - does that apply to the
Australian government as well as Yang?
Richard McGregor, a China
specialist at Sydney’s Lowy Institut, downplays the idea that China is sending
a message to Australia.
“It’s less about Australia and
more about them,” he said. “On the one hand, the MSS is likely largely
indifferent to the deleterious impact Yang’s verdict will have on relations
with Australia. But you could imagine that State Security deliberately demanded
the harshest sentence possible as awarning to pro- democracy activists that
they are risking their lives”.
State Security has particular
reasons to focus on Yang Hengjun, now 58. He was once one of its own elite
recruits, joining the ministry after graduating from Shanghai’s Fudan
University and being posted under cover to Hongkong from 1994 to 1997, covering
the run-up to Britain’s handover of territory.
Then, after a two year spell at
the Atlantic Council in Washington, he migrated to Australia. As well as
writing his spy thrillers, he gained a Ph.D . at the University of Technology
Sydney (UTS) in 2007 with a study of how chinese political activists were
evading internet firewalls to ciruclate their messages. His research contacts
enabled Yang to develop a huge following for his Chinese language blogs
discussing political reform.
But tolerance was wearing thin.
His UTS doctoral supervisor, professor Feng Chongyi, a self-declared
“liberal”in the Chinese context, was himself detained in March 2017 by State
Security. Feng says that before pressure from Canberra and his university got
him released, he was questioned intensively about Yang’s activities and
connections. “They said: We will get rid of him,” he recalled.
The audience for Yang's blogs,
and the income he derived, dwindled. Feng helped Yang get a two-year visiting
fellowship at New York's Columbia University, augmented by informal daigou
trading of American luxuries to China. In January 2019, with his Columbia
attachment ended, Yang and his second wife headed back to Australia, making the
fatal decision to visit his elderly parents on the way. "I told him not to
go back to China," Feng said. "He said, 'If they want to take me,
they would have done it long ago.'"
Feng says the arrest may have
have been a State Security precaution to remove the potentially influential
figure ahead of two big anniversaries coming up in 2019: the centenary of the
May 4, 1919, student uprising over foreign concession ports, and the 30th
anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
But to justify the conviction,
State Security reached back to Yang's time in Hong Kong, accusing him of spying
for Taiwan. Feng says that actually the MSS entrusted Yang to open contact with
Taiwanese intelligence operatives ahead of the 1997 handover. He performed so
well he got the plum attachment at the Atlantic Council while still an MSS
officer.
Meanwhile, as well as overriding
the Foreign Ministry, State Security recently extended its counterintelligence
ambit to cover foreign and local businessmen and financial analysts, further
damaging economic confidence.
There is little sign of the MSS
being reined in. "In any political system, it's difficult to push back
against the internal security service," said Lowy's McGregor.
"Eventually, with 'wolf warrior' diplomacy, there was a top-level political
intervention and it largely stopped. So far, the MSS's role seems very much in
line with the direction [President] Xi Jinping has set for the country. The
only incentive in China is to exceed what you think the leader wants."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Yang-Hengjun-s-death-sentence-shows-power-of-China-s-secret-service