Yang Hengjun Receives a Death Sentence

For anyone wondering how 2024 might shape up from the point of view of creative and intellectual freedom, the decision on Monday of China’s oppressive regime to sentence author and businessman Yang Hengjun to death has sent a loud and decisive answer. 

Technically, Beijing imposed a “suspended death sentence,” meaning that if Hengjun can avoid breaking the law for two years, he might benefit from an act of magnanimity on the part of communist officials and “only” have to spend his life behind bars, rather than face lethal injection or a firing squad. 

Back in 2019, the regime arrested Hengjun on charges of espionage and made him disappear after he stopped off in Guangzhou while en route from the United States to his home in Australia. In the years since, he has reportedly undergone hundreds of interrogations about his alleged spying and has grappled with radically worsening health, including a cyst on his kidney for which he cannot receive proper treatment while languishing in jail. 

The threat to execute a writer and blogger who does not approve of unchecked state power may just scuttle the wobbly relations between China and Australia, whose prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has pled with Beijing to do the right thing and treat Hengjun with decency. Though Henjun’s fate doesn’t have as much direct relevance to U.S-Chinese affairs, it’s still appalling that this sordid affair has barely evinced a peep from American voices like PEN America that purport to, as PEN claimed in a January 26 release, work “tirelessly to defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture.” 

But for anyone who has followed the depredations of the regime in Beijing and the constant stomping on the intellectual freedom of the Chinese people, the case of Hengjun is shocking but not surprising. 

The novelist and short story writer Wang Meng, who will turn 90 in October, has witnessed at first hand some of the most dramatic periods of his nation’s modern history, and briefly served as China’s minister of culture. Meng captured the dilemma of figures like Hengjun in a short story entitled “The Eye of Night,” which appeared in a 1983 collection whose English title is The Butterfly and Other Stories. 

“The Eye of Night,” in Janice Wickeri’s and Marylin Chin’s translation, is about a writer named Chen Gao who visits a provincial city to attend a literary conference, full of hope and idealism. He goes looking for a stranger whose father, he has reason to believe, was once on friendly terms with Gao’s own father in their army days, before the revolution and bloody civil war. When Gao reaches the apartment complex where the son of his father’s friend lives, things do not go at all as planned. The mutual acquaintance turns out to fear and distrust him and to disbelieve any advances from people who claimed to know his dad.

Cynicism and paranoia have thoroughly infected the young man, whose name we never learn, and who demands to know what Gao can offer him in return for any help or support. He speaks to Gao with contempt, not to say loathing, lacking any conception of Gao as a visionary who, if once given space to spread his wings and share his views at the conference, might offer ideas and language that could enrich people’s lives and help them exist on far better terms.  

Yang Hengjun may have visited Guangzhou in 2019 in the hope and belief that people there would hail him as a dissident and a writer who has helped keep the things that really matter—intellectual curiosity, education, high culture, the free flow of knowledge and ideas and words and concepts and beliefs—alive and well. 

But the world has mostly forgotten him and what he stands for. As Hengjun rots in jail with a deteriorating kidney, ignored by the very organizations that profess to value the literary life and the freedoms of writers and intellectuals, he may feel a bit like the author in Wang Meng’s short story, a stranger in his homeland, cut off from the solicitude and respect that people used to feel for oracles.