A prominent Chinese journalist, who was imprisoned on spying charges that he denies, is caught in a deadlock with the authorities in Beijing after they rebuffed his request for medical parole to remove a potentially cancerous lung tumor, his son said on Thursday.
The journalist, Dong Yuyu, 64, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2024. He was an editor for a Chinese Communist Party-run newspaper, Guangming Daily, but in past years wrote essays that called for political liberalization. He mixed with foreign journalists and diplomats, and was arrested in 2022 while dining with a Japanese diplomat in Beijing.
The standoff over Mr. Dong’s parole request reflects the often-precarious conditions facing political prisoners in China.
Mr. Dong’s son, Yifu Dong, said that his father suffered from an irregular heartbeat and that a doctor found a lung tumor that might be malignant. But his father believes that the main prison hospital in Beijing does not have the facilities and expertise to remove the tumor successfully and quickly test whether it is malignant, the son said by telephone from Canada, citing information passed on by family members in China.
Mr. Dong has asked for medical parole so he can receive surgery at a better-equipped hospital in Beijing, but officials have denied his request. They have instead offered to bring an outside surgeon to the prison hospital, but Mr. Dong still believes that it does not have the specialized facilities for such an operation — and feared the surgeon may not be experienced enough, Yifu Dong said. Prison officials have said Mr. Dong could be discharged from the prison hospital and sent back to his cell if he does not agree to their terms for surgery, his son added.
“They’re threatening to deny treatment if we refuse” their terms, Yifu Dong said. “It should be a pure medical and humanitarian issue, and should be a low bar for the authorities. Yet even meeting this low bar is proving to be difficult, and that’s disappointing.”
