A Round Up of News and Comments Surrounding the Arrest of Singapore Journalist Ching Cheong in China....

Our friends in China are at it again, this time with the arrest on April 22nd of Ching Cheong, a writer with the Singapore "Straits Times."

The arrest has transformed from a story on how the journalist was arrested for attempting to buy an unauthorized biography of the late Zhao Ziyang, who was considered sympathetic to the students protesting prior to the June 4, 1989 massacre to an accusation by the Chinese authorities that he was spying for a foreign government. They are now.....

insisting Tuesday his arrest last month had nothing to do with the late Chinese Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang or journalistic activities.

Yeeeaaaaa....that's the ticket! Not!

Today's The Standard article.

Simon World blog where he also goes into the mandatory brainwashing course that journalists must attend in order to retain their licenses.

The Peking Duck is just sick about this, waiting for all the China apologists to put forth their sorry excuses. There are over a hundred comments following the post.

Asiapundit notes that CC was just doing his job as a journalist of gathering information for a foreign organization. More from Asiapundit here.

Big White Guy says that China is lying. Also, that they are trying their best to shut down anything that has to do with June 4th.

Those That Dare points out the irony that the Straits Times is the government owned newspaper of Singapore and that it is also subject to censorship and state control.

The Washington Post a couple of days ago.

Glutter thinks that this is just another attempt by China to slowly tighten the screws on journalists so they do a better job of self censorship.

Daai Tou Laam.

The BBC reports that the International Federation of Journalists has called for his release.

My opinion: I think that there are several things going on here. There is a typical scam involving local officials against foreign Chinese where they get "caught"/set-up doing something that is somewhat illegal or accused of doing something illegal. They are then held for ransom and their loved ones are told not to tell anyone and if they do, then they will put them on trial for some trumped up charge.

Also, the mad-mandarins are very concerned with covering up everything that they can regarding June 4th massacre of innocent students. There must be something with the transcripts of the late Zhao Ziyang that has gotten the mandarin's sphincter muscles a-twitchin'. This sends a very strong message to domestic and foreign journalists that there is high price to pay for screwing around with the residents of the fever-swamps of Beijing.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. I have actually been surprised on the lack of press in the USA on this incident. Maybe, what the Beijing authorities are betting on is that the world will tire of this game and forfeit a victory to them.

And please don't forget the arrest and detention of New York Times researcher, Zhao Yan September of last year, who has been in detention since. Additionally, the scores of domestic Chinese reporters that are regularly harassed, arrested and abused doing their jobs of reporting the news.