Plain-clothes police officers have taken a prominent Beijing-based pastor and his wife to a nearby Hebei county as the city steps up efforts to control dissidents in the run-up to the Olympics. Zhang Mingxuan, president of the Chinese House Church Alliance, said he and his ailing wife, Xie Fenglan, had been whisked off to Hebei's Yanjiao township on Friday night after a week of harassment. 'The police have said that they don't want me to stay in Beijing during the Olympics, because they don't want me to meet foreigners,' said Mr Zhang, a well-known house church figure who has often met foreign officials visiting China. A large number of Christians in China prefer house churches, which do not register with official agencies, instead of going to the government-sanctioned churches that they see as deviating from doctrine. Mr Zhang said around seven plain-clothes officers raided a guesthouse they had been staying in at around 6pm on Friday and told them to leave. 'They said they had paid for the room and we had to leave. They didn't give us time to pack and carried us away in their car, which was escorted by another car,' he said. 'Without saying anything they just dumped us at a guesthouse in Yanjiao and left.' Mr Zhang and his wife had rejected repeated demands during the week by police from various districts to leave Beijing. The couple had to move from guesthouse to guesthouse six times during the week, he said. He said the owner of one guesthouse was warned by police that he would be detained if he did not kick the couple out. On Tuesday, after being kept at Beijing's Xiaotangshan government building for hours, Mr Zhang managed to take his wife to a hospital for medical treatment, with a police escort. 'In the hospital, the police officers said they could give us 5,000 yuan [ HK$5,730] if we left Beijing for three months,' he said. 'But my wife refused because she needs to see a doctor very often.' Mr Zhang was placed under house arrest after meeting US congressmen Frank Wolf and Christopher Smith last month. He was also detained for 31 hours last month while he and his interpreter were on their way to meet Bastiaan Belder, of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee. Beijing police were unavailable for comment.