China gives suspended death sentence to Australian writer Yang Hengjun on espionage charges. What does it mean?
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A court in Beijing has given a suspended death sentence to Australian-Chinese writer Yang Hengjun on charges of espionage. Yang, a pro-democracy blogger, was arrested at the Guangzhou airport in 2019. He had been accused of spying for a country China has not publicly identified. The details of the case against him have not been made public. A suspended death sentence in Chinese law gives the accused a two-year reprieve from being executed, after which it is automatically converted to life imprisonment or, more rarely, a fixed-term imprisonment. Human rights advocates argue that a suspended death sentence is an unusually harsh verdict in an espionage-related case. Yang has denied the allegations and claimed that he was tortured at a secret detention site. China's foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin confirmed the sentence and stated that all of Yang's personal property has been confiscated.
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