Chinese security police may have thwarted an attempt to set up an underground political party to challenge communist rule by arresting a US-based dissident who had entered the country secretly.
The incident coincides with the arrival in China of three senior religious leaders from the US appointed by President Clinton to report on religious freedom in China, and the release of a religious dissident as an apparent act of goodwill by the Chinese authorities.
The detention of Mr Wang Bingzhang (50), founder of the exiled dissident group, Alliance for Democracy, injects new tensions into the strained debate between the US and China over human rights.
The US government will be under pressure to demand the release of Mr Wang, who was detained in Bengbu city in Anhui province on Friday, as he is either a US citizen or holds a US green card given to political refugees.
His seizure, along with another dissident, Mr Wang Tingjin (43), a mathematics teacher, who was said not to be involved in the new party, comes days before a secret meeting to set up the pro-democracy group, dissident sources told Reuters in Beijing.
This was to be called the Justice Party, according to Mr Fu Shenqi, a Chinese dissident living in exile in the US.
If this is the case, the security police appear to have inside information on the clandestine movement and more arrests could follow. The seizure of Mr Wang has apparently left his colleagues outside China with no option but to pubicise the fact to draw international attention to his fate.
Anyone trying to set up a new party in China faces imprisonment for sedition. Mr Frank Lu Siqing, head of the Hong Kongbased Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China, disclosed that Mr Wang had entered China from Portuguese-run Macao under a false name.
Mr Wang is a veteran dissidentin-exile. He was sent by the Chinese Communist government to Canada in 1978 to study medicine, but after obtaining a doctoral degree he defected to the US where he founded the magazine, China Spring.
His arrest recalls the international incident when former Chinese prisoner, Mr Harry Wu, left the US to secretly re-enter China and guide a western TV crew to the site of labour camps. He was arrested, sentenced to 15 years, then expelled just before the planned visit by Ms Hillary Rodham Clinton to the UN Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995.
The first of the three visiting US religious leaders, Rabbi Arthur Schneier of New York, arrived in Beijing yesterday. The Rev Don Argue, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark are due to join him today.
In a move apparently timed to create a positive atmosphere for the first-ever visit by such a highranking inter-denominational delegation, China released a Christian activist on Saturday, according to a Hong Kong-based human rights group yesterday. Mr Gao Feng, a former employee at a Sino-US car-making joint venture in Beijing, had come to the end of a 2 1/2-year sentence in a labour camp imposed in 1995, according to a statement from the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China.