BEIJING detained a dissident journalist two days before she was scheduled to arrive in Hong Kong on her way to take up a fellowship at the Columbia University Journalism School.
Gao Yu, 49, was detained on Saturday by officers from the public and state security bureaus in Beijing.
Her husband, Zhao Yuankang, said yesterday that the security agents gave no reason for her arrest and he did not know where she was being held.
A prominent Hong Kong member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Xu Simin, who was to have been one of Gao's hosts in Hong Kong, said he would take up her case with the authorities on his arrival in Beijing today.
Gao, a vice-chief editor of the defunct Economics Weekly, is known to Hong Kong and overseas-Chinese readers for articles she has written for local magazines and newspapers.
She has for several years been a special correspondent of The Mirror, the Chinese-affiliated journal owned by Mr Xu.
Gao was imprisoned for 14 months after the June 4, 1989, crackdown, mainly because of her association with the Economics Weekly, of which one of the founders was ''black hand'' dissident Wang Juntao.
