China has detained an ethnic Chinese intellectual who is also a US permanent resident, a Hong Kong human rights group said yesterday.
The State Security Bureau detained Mr Qin Guangguang in Beijing in December on suspicion of leaking state secrets, a statement from the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said.
China-born Mr Qin, whose wife Ms Fong Li is also a permanent US resident, was expected to be formally arrested and charged next week, the centre added.
The statement said that Beijing suspected that Mr Qin had leaked confidential information to a friend of his who worked at an overseas intelligence authority, the group said.
Mr Qin, who works for a US medical group, was chief editor of a now-defunct Chinese economic journal from 1986 to 1989.
He was a visiting scholar at Michigan University, Chicago University and Stanford University in the US from 1989 to 1992, before returning to China in 1994.
His father-in-law is a senior government official in central China's Sichuan province, according to the information centre.
It said Mr Qin would not have been charged had it not been for deteriorating Sino-US relations, intensifying power struggles in the Chinese government, and a surge in cases related to leaking state secrets.
Since July, at least 20 people - most of them intellectuals - had been detained in Beijing for leaking state secrets and gathering intelligence, the human rights group said.