Chinese authorities have detained a journalist and co-author of a best-selling book calling for political reform before a historic meeting in Beijing between the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, and the Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin.
Security agents took Mr Shi Binhai (36), an editor and commentator of the China Economic Times, from his Beijing home on September 5th, according to Reuters, quoting sources close to the journalist.
Mrs Robinson will today meet President Jiang and Vice-Premier Mr Qian Qichen at the end of a nine-day tour of China, the first by a UN commissioner for human rights. She said in Shanghai yesterday that she was concerned about the detention of the journalist, although she stopped short of saying she would raise it with the Chinese leaders.
"I am concerned about a number of issues that happened during the visit," she told reporters in response to a question about Mr Shi, who co-edited a best-selling volume of pro-reform essays called Political China: Facing the Era of Choosing a New Structure. The police allegedly gave no reason for his detention, warned his family not to tell anybody about it and seized cassette tapes, documents, photographs, name cards and books.
Mr Shi is a veteran of the 1989 pro-democracy movement. He was jailed for two years and joined the China Economic Times in the mid-1990s. Just before Mrs Robinson's visit, police briefly detained Ms Natalie Liu (32), a Chinese television producer working for the US network CBS News as a freelance associate producer.
World media organisations have expressed concern about three other journalists in China's prisons. Mr Gao Yu (54), deputy editor-in-chief of the now defunct Economic Weekly magazine, was given six years in 1994 for leaking state secrets in articles published in a Hong Kong magazine.
Mr Li Binghua (47), a Beijingbased journalist with the left-wing Hong Kong paper Ta Kung Pao, was held for two months last year for leaking sensitive information to a Hong Kong journalist.
Mr Wu Shisen, an editor of China's official Xinhua news agency, was jailed for life in 1993 and his wife, Ms Mao Tao, also a journalist, was sentenced to six years in prison for selling state secrets - an advance copy of President Jiang Zemin's speech to the 14th Communist Party Congress - to a Hong Kong journalist.
Mrs Robinson described her time in China as a "pathfinding visit" and said she hoped to advance human rights issues in a "more structured way". In an interview with RTE special correspondent Charlie Bird, E, recorded in Tibet, the UN commissioner said she had raised all the issues she wanted with the authorities. She said: "They know I will be tough", but added: "I also want to work with them".
One of the issues Mrs Robinson raised was an incident involving Ms Chu Hailan, the wife of a jailed labour activist, who was manhandled by police and hotel security guards as she prepared to deliver a letter to Mrs Robinson in Beijing last week.
In Shanghai, Mrs Robinson said she had also asked about a number of individuals during her stop in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. These included Mr Yulo Dawa Tsering (69), a dissident monk who is on parole after 27 years in prison and said to be under effective house arrest. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights asked to meet him two weeks before coming to China, she told RTE, but was informed by officials in Lhasa he could not be found.