Veteran journalist Gao Yu jailed for 7 years for leaking worst-kept 'state secret' ever

By Ryan Kilpatrick, April 17, 2015

Veteran Chinese journalist Gao Yu has been sentenced to seven years in prison for "leaking state secrets abroad."

The "state secret" in question, however, is divulges neither military nor economic intelligence.

Believed to be contained within an internal Communist Party memo called Document No. 9, the "secret" is a list of "seven perils" facing the Party's authoritarian rule: Western-style constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism, Western-style journalism, and questioning the Party’s historical record and current direction.

The verdict, handed down by Beijing No. 3 Intermediate Court earlier this morning, confirms the veracity of Document No. 9, which lays bare the vigorous clampdown on civil society and press freedom that has come to characterize the rule of Xi Jinping.

Gao, 71, was arrested in April last year and faced trial in November. In May, she was forced to make a televised confession that she later claimed was extracted under coercion, when threats were made against her son.

Bao Tong, a former top CCP official, said before the sentencing that Gao had simply fulfilled "the sacred duty of a journalist" by disclosing the document's existence, adding that "not a word of what she wrote is a lie."

State secret laws, vaguely worded and arbitrarily applied, are frequently used to silence activists and journalists critical of the Communist party-state. What constitutes a "state secret" is left deliberately open-ended in Chinese law, meaning that even publicly available information can be deemed a state secret if it is communicated overseas.

In state secret trials, which are exempt from the requirements that Chinese trials be open, it is impossible for defendants to challenge such a classification