Hong Kong – A Hong Kong journalist whose writings for Singa pore’s main newspaper have won him a reputation as one of the best-connected analysts of Chinese politics has been detained for more than a month by authorities in China, his wife said Monday.
The arrest of the journalist, Ching Cheong, the chief China correspondent for the Straits Times, represents the latest in a series of arrests of Hong Kong citizens on the mainland over the past several years. The arrests have raised worries about whether China is increasingly treating residents of this fairly autonomous city the same way it treats mainland Chinese citizens.
Mary Lau, Ching’s wife, said her husband was quietly detained April 22 in Guangzhou, a city 90 miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong.
She said he had been trying to obtain documents on conversations that Zong Fengmin, a retired party official, had with Zhao Ziyang, who was purged as general secretary of the Communist Party after the killings in Tian anmen Square in 1989. Zhao, who had lived under house arrest for 15 years, died in January and was said to have reservations about his successors.
Ching’s arrest is likely to attract particular attention because he graduated from one of Hong Kong’s most exclusive Anglican secondary schools, St. Paul’s College. The school has long been a training ground for Hong Kong’s political and economic elite, including Beijing supporters and democracy advocates.
Ching went on to attend Hong Kong University, then worked for Wen Wei Po, a leftist local newspaper with close ties to Beijing, until 1989, when he quit to protest the Tiananmen crackdown.
Lee Wing-tat, chairman of the opposition Democratic Party in Hong Kong, said he regarded the detained journalist as a personal friend.
Lee said his party, the largest pro-democracy grouping in the legislature, wanted the mainland government to explain the detention and would ask the Hong Kong government to look into Ching’s arrest.