Posted on 05/30/2005 4:56:13 PM PDT by Valin
A JOURNALIST considered to be the doyen of China correspondents has been detained in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with a Communist leader purged after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to be charged in China.
Mary Lau, his wife, said: “He told me that he expected to be shut up for a long time. It seems they suspect him of stealing state secrets.” Mr Ching, 55, was arrested in the southern city of Guang-zhou on April 22. He had been trying to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader who opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Untold hundreds died when troops moved in to break up the student-led demonstration. Mr Zhao, who died in January, was sacked and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Mr Ching’s detention is evidence of the tight state grip on the media in China, which has some 42 journalists in its jails, more than any other country.
A spokesman for Singapore Press Holdings, publisher of The Straits Times, said: “Ching Cheong has served us with distinction as a very well- informed correspondent and analyst. We have no cause to doubt that . . . he has conducted himself with the utmost professionalism.” Mrs Lau said that she believed her husband’s arrest was linked to his interest in the manuscript of secret interviews with Mr Zhao compiled by his doctor, who had rare access to a man kept incommunicado for the last 14 years of his life.
She believed that her husband was lured into a trap by security officials.
The authorities are worried that Mr Zhao’s inside knowledge of the decision to order troops to shoot demonstrators in Tiananmen Square might become public. “I think he was set up,” Mrs Lau said. The maximum penalty for selling state secrets is death.
Mr Ching had been covering China for 31 years and had many government contacts. He worked for 15 years for the Wen Wei Po, a Hong Kong newspaper with close ties to the Communist Party, but resigned after the 1989 crackdown.
Mr Ching gained respect for breaking stories, particularly on internal decisions of the Communist Party, and for his insights into Chinese politics. China has never jailed a journalist working for a foreign publication. It usually detains them briefly and deports them on charges such as spying.
The last foreign journalist to be held was Anthony Grey, of the Reuters news agency, who was incarcerated for two years in his home in Beijing at the height of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. However, Chinese and Hong Kong nationals have been sent to prison. In April a former editor of Contemporary Business News in the southern Hunan province was sentenced to ten years for passing state secrets to an unidentified overseas publication. In 1994 Xi Yang, a Hong Kong citizen and reporter for the city’s Ming Pao newspaper, was jailed for 12 years for stealing state secrets — gold output figures and changes in interest rate policy.
pong
...meanwhile Chinese communist party officials blast the Japanese government for not honestly facing up to its past crimes.
Tiananmen...!
Ancient history.
What about Ubzekstan..?
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