WASHINGTON – 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.

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 eight meetings with 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 X at the time that the verdict was unjust.

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.”