Mr Wang Bingzhang (51), the US-based Chinese dissident arrested in central China at the weekend, must have known of the risks involved in returning secretly to his native land after 20 years, allegedly in order to organise an underground pro-democracy party.
Mr Wang was listed on a Chinese government list of 49 dissidents obtained by human rights groups in 1995 as category 2: to be refused entry to China. He apparently got past immigration last month at the border post in the Portuguese colony of Macau by posing as Qi Xin.
The danger was not just that he would be identified, followed and arrested, but that the security police would be watching everyone he contacted and that they, too, would be put at risk, whether or not involved in pro-democracy activity, which under Chinese law is a criminal act.
And this may indeed be happening. Mr Wang travelled to Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Anhui, and started meeting people - up to 10 - after his arrival in the mainland on January 23rd, according to Mr Fu Shenqi, a veteran dissident living in New York.
Two pro-democracy activists have since been picked up in Shanghai, according to a Hong Kong human rights group, which says more arrests will follow. The detention of Mr Yang Qinheng and Mr Zhang Rujuan in Shanghai is believed to be connected to Mr Wang's visit, the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said in a statement.
Mr Yang has spent two years in jail and three in a labour camp for his pro-democracy agitation, and Mr Zhang was jailed for 1 1/2 years in 1990, for underground publishing activities.
A 43-year-old mathematics teacher was detained with Mr Wang but was said by sources outside China not to be involved in the new movement, to be called the Justice Party.
Mr Wang was arrested in Bengbu city about 300km from Shanghai on Friday, days before a secret meeting to set up the prodemocracy group, according to dissident sources. He is a US green card holder, giving him right of residency under a political asylum programme.
The US embassy in Beijing said yesterday it had taken up the case of Mr Wang, who defected to the US after studying medicine in Canada and founded the Chinese Alliance for Democracy in 1984, the first overseas dissident group.
Overseas activists were to meet yesterday in New York to discuss efforts to secure the release of Mr Wang, who was said to be often at odds with other exiled Chinese in the fractious world of Chinese dissidents in the US.
Mr Fu said: "Wang Bingzhang is mentally prepared to go to jail. He is willing to give everything for China's pro-democracy movement," adding that he feared the detention would delay plans for the secret meeting of overseas and domestic dissidents.
"The original time and place of the meeting will be changed," he said. "Before this, all democracy activist groups were based overseas. The aim this time was to set up a domestic base that would be linked to overseas support."
The head of the Hong Kong human rights centre, Mr Lu Siqing, said Chinese authorities were likely to deal with Mr Wang sternly, as a warning. "He is in a very bad situation. He is not an American citizen, so the American government cannot protect him. The Communist Party will probably be determined to punish him to prevent other dissidents, especially those from overseas, from sneaking back in."
The Chinese Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment. In Hong Kong, activists from the radical April 5th Action Group marched to the Chinese Foreign Ministry building yesterday to denounce Mr Wang's detention.