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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 early—and 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 Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, and another CASS administrator, Chen Hui, had been rounded up around the same time for allegedly leaking state secrets—a charge that, like espionage, can carry the death penalty. But in an open letter to Hong Kong newspapers last Friday, Ching's wife, Mary Lau, claimed that her husband was not working for "a foreign intelligence agency," as Beijing alleges. In fact, Lau stated, Ching regularly helped to research reports for the Chinese government on Hong Kong and Taiwan affairs. His government contact? None other than sociologist Lu, whom she claims occasionally gave Ching internal information on communications between China's senior leaders.

So how is it that a self-described "nationalist" reporter who once worked for Hong Kong's pro-Beijing daily Wen Wei Po and a sociologist who often appeared on Chinese television to promote government policy are being detained for anti-Chinese activities? According to Lau, the 55-year-old reporter was picked up by Chinese security personnel on April 22 while in Guangzhou to collect a top-secret manuscript by a friend of Zhao Ziyang, the popular ex-Premier purged for opposing the Tiananmen crackdown, who died under house arrest in January. Although the manuscript's exact contents are not clear, a previous memoir by the friend, Zong Fengming, who was able to visit Zhao under house arrest, quoted the former leader as saying that calls for democracy in 1989 came not just from students but from many mid-level Party bureaucrats as well. That claim is incendiary, for the Communist Party has always dismissed the pro-democracy movement as the work of a small number of "black hands" who manipulated the students. After Ching was detained, Lau said, security personnel searched his computer and discovered notes on the leadership discussions that Lu presumably had passed to him. Those internal communications could constitute the state secrets at issue. Lau, who last spoke to Ching on May 29, is not hopeful she will see her husband of 22 years anytime soon: "He said it will take a long time for him to come back."

Ching and the CASS academics were not the only detainees to make headlines. Police passed to the prosecutor's office last week the investigation into Zhao Yan, a Beijing researcher for the New York Times who has been held incommunicado since September. Zhao is under investigation for both fraud and leaking state secrets, but his lawyer has not yet seen details of the police reports. In April, Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets to foreign media. (What was leaked and to whom has not been made public—those details are, by definition, state secrets themselves.) And last week, a newspaper run by the China Youth Daily called Bingdian Weekly was quietly shut down after publishing an article about democracy in Taiwan.

All in all, media-rights group Reporters Without Borders says 32 journalists are currently imprisoned in China for their reporting. Says Nicholas Becquelin, Hong Kong-based research director for Human Rights in China: "Over the past six months, there has been a definite tightening of freedoms for the media, academics and publishing houses. I think [the recent detentions] are a sign that the leadership is striking hard to make an example of these people so that fear is instilled in these sensitive professions." In the past, detained dissidents were usually released soon after June 4. Will that happen this year?

• Hannah Beech
• A string of arrests in the months before the Tiananmen anniversary is more than just a roundup of usual suspects