China detains ex-journalist for leaking ‘state secrets’

AFP, BEIJING

China has detained a prominent former journalist for leaking “state secrets,” police said yesterday, the latest move to silence critics of the Chinese Communist Party ahead of June’s 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Gao Yu （高玉）, 70, was “criminally detained on suspicion of providing state secrets to sources outside China,” the Beijing public security department said in a message on its microblog yesterday.

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Gao, the former deputy editor-in-chief of magazine Economics Weekly, is a well-known journalist who was named one of the International Press Institute’s 50 “world press freedom heroes” in 2000.

Her political writings have seen her jailed in the past. In 1993, she was sentenced to six years in prison on a similar “state secrets” charge.

She was paraded yesterday on state-run China Central Television, in the latest instance of authorities publicly shaming influential critics of Beijing with televised confessions.

It showed her being escorted down a hallway and interrogated by two uniformed police officers.

“I believe what I have done has touched on legal issues and has endangered the country’s interests,” said Gao, whose face was obscured on the broadcast. “What I have done was a big mistake. I earnestly and sincerely have learned a lesson from this experience, and admit my guilt.”

According to Xinhua news agency, Gao was held on April 24 on suspicion of having sent a copy of a “highly confidential” document to an overseas Web site in June last year.

Police seized “substantial evidence” from her home and Gao has “expressed deep remorse about what she did,” Xinhua said, adding that she was “willing to accept punishment from the law.”

The Xinhua report did not name the document that Gao is alleged to have leaked, but Gao has written previously on “Document No. 9,” a Chinese Communist Party internal communique calling for a harsh crackdown on dissent and warning against “perils” such as multiparty democracy and universal values.

The document circulated early last year and its full text was published by a Hong Kong-based magazine in August last year.

Gao’s detention comes amid a crackdown on academics, rights activists and other Chinese Communist Party critics ahead of the sensitive June 4 anniversary.

Pu Zhiqiang （浦志強）, one of China’s most celebrated human rights lawyers, was arrested on Tuesday “over charges of creating disturbances,” his lawyer said and campaigners say others have also been held.