When reporting that a popular scholar has been detained by the Chinese government, it doesn’t sound good to suddenly switch to the past tense in the last two paragraphs:

He was a popular commentator in the Japanese media and appeared at panels and a symposium on Sino-Japanese relations.

Jin was from Yanji, an ethnically Korean area near China's border with North Korea.

I can’t decide if it’s a simple editing mistake, or a sudden outbreak of honest reporting.