The police ordered me to strip for a body search. They had detained me near Taishi village, on the outskirts of Guangzhou - on the pretext that I wasn't carrying ID. The real reason was to stop me reporting on the first anniversary of a bloody crackdown on peasants exercising their electoral rights.
I was so shocked by the order that I numbly got up to comply, without thinking. I was lucky that the room wasn't ready.
While I was waiting, I remembered the images from last year, when a naked woman - initially thought to be Chinese - was filmed squatting in front of a policewoman in a Malaysian prison. Was I about to be a Malaysian woman stripped naked in a Chinese police station?
I said to myself, 'no'. Out of desperation, I told the police I wouldn't co-operate: they would have to use force. That stopped them.
The real reason for my harrowing experience was that it was August 16 - one year after police crushed an attempt by Taishi villagers to depose their headman for alleged corruption. Police did not want any commemoration or reporting on the anniversary.
Yet it was the government officials in Panyu district, where Taishi is located, who had asked me to see them that morning, to discuss my queries about a state of fear in the village. However, they didn't tell me anything and wouldn't take me there. I had already been beaten in Taishi once, and it was too dangerous to go there on my own.
Villagers had told me that the authorities had set up surveillance cameras everywhere, deployed hundreds of police and thugs, and detained some activists. But I knew that this would not stop them - or other villagers, all over Guangzhou and Guangdong - from fighting for their rights.
