China watchers have come to call it "the spring of arrests": each year, in the weeks leading up to the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, security forces detain dissidents lest they call attention to Beijing's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. But this year, spring arrived a little earlyand netted some unusual suspects.
News trickled out last week that Ching Cheong, the Hong Kong-based chief China correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times, had been detained in late April on suspicion of espionage. Three days later, word spread that Lu Jianhua, a sociologist at the government-run Chinese Academy of...
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