SYDNEY - Australian blogger Yang Hengjun, appearing in a Beijing court on Monday to receive a suspended death sentence on espionage charges, looked "very thin, very fragile", his friends in Sydney said.

The description relayed to them by Yang's wife, who sat in court, was a far cry from the charismatic man whose writing on the internet's potential to spur Chinese democracy had won a large online following in China two decades earlier. Yang's writing career had first blossomed in Australia.

"Dynamic, relentlessly energetic, smart, funny and astute," one writer recalled of Yang's Sydney days.

Yang was born in China and, after quitting China's Ministry of State Security where he had worked for a decade, migrated to Australia in 1999. He studied for a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney under the supervision of a leading Chinese liberal scholar, Feng Chongyi.

Yang's writing also ranged into thrillers. Between 2002 and 2005 he wrote a trilogy of spy novels, Fatal Weakness, Fatal Weapon and Fatal Assassination, published in Taiwan.

In his 2004 novel, the CIA director, U.S. president and Taiwan’s president are embroiled in a plotline about tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

Yang's friends and family in Australia, including Feng, faced an anxious wait on Monday morning after learning that a court sentence would be announced, five years since he was detained and after 10 previous delays in a verdict.

Along with Yang's wife, Chinese blogger Yuan Xiaoliang, Australian diplomats were in the Beijing court room this time, unlike his one-day trial in May 2021, when then Australian Ambassador Graham Fletcher was refused entry.

Yang's Beijing lawyers have been forbidden by Chinese authorities from speaking about the national security case.

The 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, fixed-term imprisonment.

POOR HEALTH

Visits by Australian embassy officials to Yang's prison once a month had provided reports to his family about his failing health that alarmed them.

In a letter, his two Australian-based sons wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in October urging Canberra to seek Yang's release on medical grounds, after being told by consular officials he had collapsed several times and had been unable to walk for weeks.

In his messages to family and friends over five years from prison, Yang had repeatedly declared himself a Chinese patriot, the messages show.

Yang told his sons in a letter he was proud of everything he had written online, which had sought to "contribute to the well-being of the people and the wealth and strength of the nation".

When he was detained in January 2019 while visiting China for the New Year with his wife, Yang had been living in New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University. He supplemented his income by working as a "daigou" or online shopping agent for Chinese consumers wanting American products.

He was a prolific blogger, dubbed the "democracy peddlar", writing more than 70 columns in Chinese in 2017, many on foreign policy topics including Donald Trump's U.S. presidency, Putin's Russia and North Korea, a review of his writing shows.

One 2017 blog post was titled "Do you feel scared when Trump is learning from China?"

In 2015-2016 Yang also published in English in The Diplomat magazine on topics spanning critiques of U.S. views of China, Chinese netizens views on North Korea, and the unification of Taiwan and Chinese corruption.

Yang had been detained in China for a short period once before, in 2011, on suspicion of links to online democracy activists. REUTERS