Arrest raises fears about safety of scribes

 

HONG KONG: A Beijing court on Thursday sentenced a Hong Kong-based journalist working for Singapore’s leading newspaper to five years’ imprisonment on charges of spying for Taiwan, over which mainland China claims sovereignty. 

 

Ching Cheong, 56, China correspondent for The Strait Times, is the second journalist from an overseas newspaper to be jailed in China since the nightmarish Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. His was the third case of imprisonment of media personnel and activists in China in the past week; last week, a blind lawyer and a New York Times researcher were sentenced to imprisonment (for four and three years respectively). 

 

Ching was detained in Guangzhou in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in April 2005, and was tried in-camera earlier this month. The official media had claimed that during interrogation, Ching had confessed to spying for Taiwan and to having received millions of Hong Kong dollars from Taiwan’s intelligence machinery, which he had used to buy information on China’s political, economic and military affairs between 2000 and 2005.

 

It had further alleged that Ching, operating under the alias Chen Yuan-chun, had passed on classified documents to Taiwan’s National Security Bureau. Copies of confidential, internal speeches of Chinese leaders were reportedly retrieved from Ching’s laptop computer. 

 

However, Ching’s wife Mary Lau alleged that Ching had been detained in Guangzhou when he had gone to secure the manuscript of clandestine interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the disgraced Communist leader who had been put under house arrest for opposing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

 

If Chiing had secured the manuscript, it would have led to his breaking a sensational story that the Chinese government was doing its utmost to gag.

 

Ching is an ‘old China hand’, having tracked the country over 30 years, and is widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable journalists on China. He had earlier worked for 15 years for Wen Wei Po, a pro-Beijing Chinese-language newspaper in Hong Kong, but had resigned in protest after the violent crushing of students’ pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

 

There are many theories surrounding the reasons for Ching’s arrest despite the fact that he was in line with official policy on the unification of Taiwan with China.

 

The arrest of two other persons about the same time as Ching — Lu Jianhua, a sociologist, and Chen Hui, an official, in the influential Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing — on suspicion of leaking state secrets offers one clue. 

 

In an open letter to President Hu Jintao, Ching’s wife Lau had claimed that her husband and Lu were working on behalf of the central government to provide inputs to help the leadership draw up official policy on Taiwan and Hong Kong, and that was the context in which copies of the internal speeches were found on Ching’s laptop. 

 

In other words, even according to his wife, Ching wasn’t just a journalist going about his newsgathering job.