WASHINGTON (AP) — The son of a Chinese journalist accused of espionage called for his father's release from a seven-year prison sentence in the high-profile case that signaled Beijing's tighten grip on journalism.
Dong Yuyu, then a senior editor at a Communist Party-run newspaper that was increasingly out of step with the party's hardening line, was arrested in February 2022 as he was having lunch with a Japanese diplomat in Beijing.
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Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu said at the National Press Club in Washington on Monday that his father is planning to appeal his convictions. He urged Japanese authorities to help show that the senior Dong's meetings with Japanese diplomats had nothing to do with espionage.
“It is a press freedom issue. It is a human rights issue. It has very little to do with national security or espionage," said the younger Dong.
China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dong Yuyu previously was the deputy head of the commentary department at the Guangming Daily, a newspaper once considered more liberal than other party outlets.
Dong wrote articles arguing for constitutional democracy, political reform and official accountability — views that were once discussed openly in party outlets but are now out of favor.
He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University from 2006 to 2007 and became a visiting fellow at Keio University in Japan in 2010. He later worked as a visiting professor at Hokkaido University in Japan before returning to China.
Dong's arrest, which came just two months before he planned to retire from Guangming Daily, shocked journalists and diplomats across China. It is common for journalists to maintain contact with diplomats as part of their newsgathering.
The younger Dong says his mother later heard in court that meetings with eight Japanese diplomats were listed as evidence against his father.
Last November, the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Dong to seven years in prison for espionage, his family previously said. Then-U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns wrote on the social platform X at the time that the verdict was unjust.
Japan’s Assistant Press Secretary Masashi Mizobuchi said Wednesday that all diplomatic activities by officials at the Japanese Embassy and Consulate in China are part of their legitimate duties.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry protested in December over the “disadvantage” the ruling created for Chinese citizens who have friendly exchanges with the Japanese Embassy and its officials, warning it has a chilling effect on economic and personal exchanges with China.
Dong is in good health and has tried to stay fit in prison by doing 200 pushups and 200 leg raises a day, his son said, but he gets just a few hours of sunlight per year and has not been allowed to see his wife.
Dong's lawyer is able to meet the journalist once a month and bring him his wife's handwritten letters, the younger Dong added, and his father prepared a 45-page handwritten document for the appeal.
Last Friday, the U.S. State Department called for the immediate and unconditional release of Dong in a post on X.
Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris, also criticized China's press freedom situation in a statement, saying the country is “the world’s largest prison for journalists” with more than 100 currently detained.
The organization said Beijing frequently charges journalists with espionage to silence them, as well overly broad charges such as subversion and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
This story corrects the title of a Japanese official to Assistant Press Secretary, not Assistant Foreign Secretary.
Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed from Tokyo.
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Dong Yifu, the son of imprisoned Chinese veteran journalist Dong Yuyu who was sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage charges, speaks about his father's detention to the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — On a day when stock markets around the world dropped precipitously, Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl led a celebration of the president whose global tariffs sparked the sell-off.
With no mention of the Wall Street roller coaster and global economic uncertainty, Wahl declared his state GOP’s “Trump Victory Dinner” — and the broader national moment — a triumph. And for anyone who rejects President Donald Trump, his agenda and the “America First” army that backs it all, Wahl had an offer: “The Alabama Republican Party will buy them a plane ticket to any country in the world they want to go to.”
Wahl's audience — an assembly of lobbyists and donors, state lawmakers, local party officials and grassroots activists — laughed, applauded and sometimes roared throughout last week's gala in downtown Birmingham, the rare Democratic stronghold in one of the nation’s most Republican states. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. elicited perhaps the most enthusiasm with an unapologetically partisan pitch, even repeating the lie that his father won the 2020 election over Democrat Joe Biden.
Yet beyond the cheerleading, there were signs of a more cautious optimism and some worried whispers over Trump’s sweeping tariffs, the particulars of his deportation policy and the aggressive slashing by his Department of Government Efficiency.
That doesn’t mean Trump or Republicans are in danger of losing their grip in Alabama, where the GOP holds all statewide offices, dominates the Legislature and has won every presidential electoral vote since 1980. But it’s a notable wrinkle in a place where there's long been tension between relying on the federal government for funding and jobs, and an embrace of the kind of anti-Washington, anti-establishment populism that has twice propelled Trump to the Oval Office. And any cracks for Trump in Alabama — where he got 65% of the vote in 2024 — could portend trouble elsewhere, as the effects of a seismic shift in U.S. policy reach across the economy and society.
“There are some concerns, some conversations,” said John Merrill, a former secretary of state, over just what Trump’s agenda will mean on the ground. Alabama, he acknowledged, has “been a net recipient” of the very federal government and economic model Trump is upending, meaning it receives more money back from Washington than its taxpayers send the federal government.
“It’s a big risk,” said Merrill, who sported a Trump 45-47 pin on his lapel, a nod to the president's two terms.
Blocks to the south of the complex where Republicans convened sits the multibillion-dollar University of Alabama at Birmingham health system, a regional gem where research depends on grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, listed as a “Silver Sponsor” of the gala, didn't join the Democratic attorneys general suing the Trump administration to stop the cancellation of certain research funding streams Congress already has approved.
Most of the medical services provided at UAB and many other hospitals throughout the state are covered by Medicare and Medicaid, two of the largest federal outlays. Alabama, because its per-capita income ranks among the lower tier among states, has one of the most generous federal match rates for Medicaid funding.
A short drive west toward Tuscaloosa sits a gargantuan Mercedes-Benz complex, one of the earliest examples of foreign auto manufacturers coming to the American South, where state laws are hostile to organized labor. The plants have provided jobs at wages higher than the local norms but in some cases lower than in union shops of the Great Lakes region around Detroit. Many suppliers have followed in the South, but not so many that the assembly plants don’t still import many parts that now will be subject to Trump’s tariffs.
Terry Martin, a county GOP committeeman in Tallapoosa County, said he supports the tariffs as leverage. Trump has “something to bargain with,” Martin said. But, “the parts that are coming from overseas … it’s going to pop it up” in price, he said, at least in the short term.
Agriculture, meanwhile, is still a dominant Alabama industry. Meat processing plants in the North and row crop farms in the South depend on migrant labor that Merrill, the former secretary of state, said involves workers who are in the U.S. both legally and illegally. Alabama, he recalled, passed its own strict immigration bill during Barack Obama's presidency only to roll it back after industry leaders complained of a depleted workforce.
Wahl, in an interview after the gala, took a more nuanced approach than he did at the podium.
“It is possible to secure our border and still take into account migrants who deserve to be here,” he said. “This has to be a two-pronged approach.”
Back in Birmingham, Interstate 65 splits the city. The aging, increasingly congested artery is a local priority for widening. The proposal has support from Alabama's two Republican senators, Tommy Tuberville and Katie Britt. U.S. interstate projects, though, are typically a 90-10 split, meaning 90% of the money comes from Washington, 10% from the state.
That funding — along with money for schools, Medicaid and other areas — could be at risk with Trump adviser Elon Musk and DOGE carrying Trump’s blessing to slash spending. GOP lawmakers who control Congress have supported Trump's agenda, which also includes dismantling the Education Department.
Tallapoosa County GOP Chair Denise Bates said “absolutely” there's a possibility DOGE could go too far. “I hope there are guardrails,” she said, noting she was once a local school board member.
“Am I 100% for getting rid of the Department of Education? I can’t say that I am,” she said, adding a phrase similar to Merrill’s description of the state as a whole. “You know, we’re a net receiver.”
Yet for all the caveats offered in one-on-one conversations, the GOP crowd cheered when Tuberville, the former football coach turned Trump acolyte on Capitol Hill, offered a plainspoken defense of Musk and his pop-up agency, telling the crowd, “We're dead broke.” And they roared as he addressed tariffs.
“It's past time we level the playing field and tell the rest of the world to get off their ass and start paying their fair share,” Tuberville said.
Bates argued that Alabama's embrace of Trump's “America First” push is not simply loyalty to the president. She said it reflects generations of voters watching the steel industry decline in Birmingham and, after the North American Free Trade Agreement was enacted in 1994, the textile industry leaving for Mexico and, eventually, Southeast Asia.
“We just want jobs,” she said.
Still, state Sen. Jabo Waggoner, the longest-serving member of the Alabama Legislature, made clear Trump's visceral appeal, declaring him “the most popular president here since Ronald Reagan, hands down.”
Wahl recalled Trump’s first massive outdoor rally as a presidential candidate: 30,000 people at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Alabama, in August 2015.
Wahl, who owns a butterfly farm outside Huntsville, said perhaps the best way to understand Trump and Alabama and this moment of uncertainty is to see a president who, at least to his supporters in the state, has earned the benefit of the doubt.
“He’s going to let everybody know he’s serious,” the chairman said. Trump is “going to bring people to the bargaining table. We’re actually going to see the negotiator conduct business.”
A guest looks over the program for Donald Trump Jr.'s visit to speak at the Alabama Republican Party's Trump Victory Celebration, Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Alabama Sen. Jabo Waggoner, left, high fives a guest as they wait for Donald Trump Jr. to speak at the Alabama Republican Party's Trump Victory Celebration, Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Donald Trump Jr. speaks at the Alabama Republican Party's Trump Victory Celebration, Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Alabama Republican Party Chair, John Wahl, speaks before Donald Trump Jr.'s visit at the Alabama Republican Party's Trump Victory Celebration, Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Alabama Republican Party Chair, John Wahl, speaks before Donald Trump Jr.'s visit at the Alabama Republican Party's Trump Victory Celebration, Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
