Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu took a question at a press conference on Tuesday about the disappearance of another dissident. Her response, which quickly pinged around the Chinese online community and its English-language China-watching counterparts, was to blithely assert: “I have not heard of that person.”

While standard practice, Ms. Jiang’s denial was especially disingenuous in this case, given that the missing man was well-known Australian-Chinese blogger and novelist Yang Hengjun, one of China’s most prominent online commentators. Also, Dr. Yang previously spent 20 years working at the same Chinese Foreign Ministry as Ms. Jiang, and the government of Australia had been asking her ministry since Sunday about his whereabouts. (More about Dr. Yang’s work here and here.)