Yang Jiechi
In January 2010, Gao's brother, Gao Zhiyi, told an interviewer that the Beijing police told him that Gao "lost his way and went missing" on 25 September 2009, igniting fears that Gao was no longer alive. On 21 January 2010, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman issued a cryptic statement that Gao was "where he should be," and said he did not know Gao's whereabouts at a later press conference. During the visit to China by David Miliband in March, the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, said that Gao had been sentenced on subversion charges, but denied he had been tortured.