Yang Hengjun was not a spy for Australia, foreign minister Marise Payne has insisted, after the Australian writer was formally charged with espionage in Beijing, potentially facing the death penalty.

“There is no basis for any allegation Dr Yang was spying for the Australian government,” Payne told the Guardian after the 54-year-old Australian was formally charged, seven months after first being detained in Guangzhou.

Yang has been charged with one act of espionage, but he faces an indefinite wait before even knowing the nature of the allegation against him.

His lawyer in Beijing, Shang Baojun, said he had not been given any detail of Yang’s alleged offence, and that it was unclear when he might be put on trial. Because the case involved state security, his lawyers have not been allowed to visit him, nor given access to any legal documents.

Yang’s lawyer in Australia, Rob Stary, said Yang’s legal team held “particular anxiety” over the fact he had now been charged with an offence that potentially carried the death penalty. Julian McMahon, who represented Van Nguyen and members of the Bali Nine facing capital charges, has been engaged to represent Yang.

There is a range of espionage offences under Chinese law, carrying penalties from three years in jail to the death penalty. Previously, it had been speculated Yang might face a lesser charge of endangering national security.

Yang was formerly a diplomat for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, before working in the private sector in Hong Kong and moving to the US, then to Australia. A writer of spy novels, he has been a popular blogger, political commentator and agitator for democratic reforms in China for more than a decade.

Yang, who became an Australian citizen in 2002, had been living in the United States, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, before flying to Guangzhou with his family in January. His wife and child were able to enter China, but authorities escorted Yang from the plane into detention.

He was initially held under a system known as “residential surveillance at a designated location”, a type of secret detention of up to six months in which authorities can deny access to lawyers and family, and restrict external communication. In July he was moved to a Beijing detention centre in the lead-up to expected charges. He is allowed one half-hour consular visit a month.

Yang would have been held in solitary confinement during his first six months of detention, Shang said. It appeared that Yang had not been physically tortured, Shang said, but it was unclear whether he had been subject to mental torture, as experienced by scores of other Chinese rights activists.

Yang’s wife, Yuan Xiaoliang, an Australian permanent resident, has been banned from leaving China.

Payne said on Tuesday morning she was “disappointed” to learn that Yang had been charged, saying he had been held “in harsh conditions without charge for more than seven months”.

“China has not explained the reasons for Dr Yang’s detention, nor has it allowed him access to his lawyers or family visits.”

Payne said she had discussed Yang’s case twice with China’s foreign minister, the state councillor Wang Yi, and written to the minister three times.

“We have serious concerns for Dr Yang’s welfare, and about the conditions under which he is being held. We have expressed these in clear terms to the Chinese authorities,” Payne said.

“It is important, and we expect, that basic standards of justice and procedural fairness are met. I respectfully reiterate my previous requests that if Dr Yang is being held for his political beliefs, he should be released.

Payne said Yang had to be treated in accordance with international human rights law, “with special attention to those provisions that prohibit torture and inhumane treatment, guard against arbitrary detention and that protect the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”.

At a daily press briefing in Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China expressed strong dissatisfaction over Payne’s remarks on Yang and urged Australia to “earnestly respect China’s judicial sovereignty and refrain from any interference in the case” according to Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily on its Twitter account.

Dr Feng Chongyi, Yang’s former doctoral supervisor, told The Guardian the charges were politically motivated and there was no evidence to support any allegation of spying against Yang.

“I am furious at the news,” Feng, who was detained for a week and interrogated by authorities in China over a study trip in 2017, said. “This is outrageous political persecution. I hope the international community will join hands to demand the release of Yang.”

A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, Geng Shuang, said Yang’s arrest had been handled in accordance with the law and that he was in good health.

Geng also voice displeasure about Australia’s “interference” in the case.

“The Australian side should earnestly respect China’s judicial sovereignty and must not ... interfere with a Chinese case,” he said.

But observers argue there has been no transparent process and the charges appear politically motivated.

Human Rights Watch Australia director Elaine Pearson said the Australian government should build a coalition with other governments whose citizens are detained in China in order to put pressure on Beijing.

“Yang is not the only person in this situation. Chinese police have a long track record of criminalising peaceful speech using charges of ‘national security’ and ‘espionage’, and torturing criminal suspects to get them to confess to crimes. And Chinese courts all too often convict people who confess under torture.”

The acting director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology, Sydney, Professor James Laurenceson, said Payne was right to use explicit language in condemning Yang’s detention, but that there was little the Australian government could do. “It’s a pretty dire situation.”

“The judiciary doesn’t sit above the Communist party, it sits underneath it. It is going to be a very difficult case to navigate legally.”

Yang is the latest in a string of foreign nationals to be arrested in China and charged with espionage or attempting to steal state secrets.

Several Australians have faced jail time in China over the past decade, including the former head of global miner Rio Tinto’s China iron ore business, Stern Hu, who served eight years after a conviction in 2010 for corruption and stealing commercial secrets.

His arrest in 2008 came after tension flared between the world’s top user of iron ore and its biggest supplier, Australia.

More recently, 16 staff from Australia’s Crown Resorts, including three Australians, were jailed for between nine and 10 months in 2017 and fined 8.62m yuan for promoting gambling to lure Chinese high-rollers to its casinos.

Australia has sought to avoid friction with Beijing, but Yang’s arrest will increase public pressure on Canberra to take a tougher line against its most important trade partner.



