National Times correspondent John Garnaut has posted a chilling report on the disappearance in China of Australian blogger Henry Yang [PICTURED, LEFT].

Garnaut says no one has heard from 'Henry' Yang (full name, Yang Hengjun) since last Sunday, "when the Australian writer phoned a colleague to say he was being followed by three men."

Garnaut reports that "Australian diplomats, already struggling to cope with the growing list of detained ethnic Chinese Australians, say they are urgently trying to find him."

Yang, whose writings included "commentaries on the workings of modern China" had divided his time between an apartment in Guangzhou and his wife and two sons in Sydney. 

Garnaut says of Yang that he hopes that "China's increasingly brutal system would not be so irrational as to 'disappear' him, when it would have been simple to send him back to Sydney or gently warn him that the censor's red line was closing in."

The ruling regime in Beijing heavily censors the Internet and has cracked down on pro-democracy activists.  Dissident Liu Xianbin was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for "inciting subversion," and another writer, Ran Yunfei, has been formally arrested.

Let's be very clear: China's ruling elite are hard, cold, repressive, anti-democracy thugs.  This is the Beijing that the U.S. confronts on all matters economic and political.  And these thugs control a regime funded by hundreds of billions of dollars in trade surpluses racked up each year with the U.S.  So, this is the regime that we are funding when we buy everything from t-shirts and toys to iPods and computers from China.

Read more about Henry Yang's disappearance.