Yang Hengjun

Yang Hengjun, a Chinese-Australian political thriller writer who lives part-time in Sydney, has gone missing in China, possibly detained by the Chinese government for his liberal politics and blogging. According the Sydney Morning Herald, Yang “has not been seen since phoning a colleague from Guangzhou airport on Sunday with news that he was being followed by three men.”

Yang is the author of a trilogy of political thriller novels. A scene from his first novel portrays a Chinese factory that preserves and sells human corpses. According to Creative Works, the literary agency that represents Yang:

Fatal Weakness, followed by Fatal Weapons and Fatal Pursuit tell of an American plot to control China, set right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Too sensitive to be published in China, these Chinese language novels have been read by millions of Chinese online….

“I want to thank the Beijing authorities personally on my own behalf because without their strong suppression of freedom of publishing, I would never have become the first political espionage novelist in China.”
-Yang Hengjun

In addition to being a novelist, Yang is an activist blogger, an outspoken pro-democracy advocate and critic of China’s political system. The New York Times writes that “Mr. Yang’s last blog entry on Netease is dated March 27, the day he vanished. The entry criticizes Peking University in Beijing for a new policy that aims to re-educate students who are deemed to have ‘radical’ thoughts.” Yang’s disappearance, the NYT reports, is part of disturbing trend:

The Chinese government, in the harshest crackdown in years, is holding scores of human rights advocates, political writers, lawyers and dissidents. The roundup began in late February after calls for a revolution modeled on the protests in Tunisia surfaced on the Internet in Chinese.