Believe only the hard evidence
Once again, a journalist, Ching Cheong, The Straits Times' chief China correspondent, has been arrested in Beijing. His arrest follows a long line of reporters who were arrested for doing no more than their job. But this time it hits closer to home because Ching is a man I know well and greatly respect.
We were both Beijing-based correspondents in the early 1980s. I worked for that capitalist rag, The Wall Street Journal, while he was employed by that esteemed communist newspaper based in Hong Kong, Wen Wei Po.
Ching was an idealistic young man, willing to work long hours for little pay because he was committed to helping China modernise. His ideals must have been dealt a bitter blow when he witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when tanks were sent in against unarmed students. He quit the paper and decided to start his own China-watching magazine, Contemporary, together with a few friends.
However, the 1990s was not a good time for magazines, especially ones focused on China, because advertisers were fearful of offending Beijing and, without advertising revenue, it was impossible to survive.
Later, Ching joined The Straits Times in Singapore and covered the mainland as well as Taiwan. He was extremely knowledgeable on cross-strait issues, having reported from both Beijing and Taipei. Last year, I invited him to talk to my students at Chinese University on the subject. They hung on to his every word.
Now we are being told by Beijing Ching confessed to espionage - a charge even more serious than stealing 'state secrets'. Fortunately, his employer, Singapore Press Holdings, is behaving in an exemplary fashion, praising him for having served the paper 'with distinction as a very well-informed correspondent and analyst'.
The paper says it asked the Singapore embassy in Beijing to offer help to Ching. But the Singapore Foreign Ministry seems not to have done a great deal to help him. It said that 'Chinese authorities have not approached us on this, and we do not have the full facts of the case'.
Beijing issued a statement saying: 'Ching admitted that in recent years he engaged in intelligence-gathering activities on the mainland on instructions from foreign intelligence agencies and accepted huge amounts of spying fees.'
Well, to borrow the words of the Times, until I see 'incontrovertible evidence' that he was engaged in espionage, I am not going to believe this. After all, he has been in their hands for five weeks.
Only recently, there was the highly publicised case of She Xianglin of Hubei province , who spent the past 11 years in prison because he had confessed to the murder of his wife after she went missing in 1994. He was released after his wife, Zhang Zaiyu , turned up safe and sound - so much for Chinese confessions.
China should know the confessions it gets are meaningless - they can always be extorted if you exert enough pressure. Only evidence counts. If the authorities have evidence, let's see it.
China prides itself on having signed more human-rights conventions than the United States. Well, signing a covenant is one thing but living up to it is another. Beijing signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 - 17 years ago - but its courts are still accepting confessions based on torture. That discredits the entire judicial system.
Ching was apparently lured to Guangzhou by security people. Incidents like this should remind Hong Kong people how precious their rights and freedoms are, and that they must be willing to stand up and fight for them.
Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based writer and commentator
