Peking Arrests Student for News Leak

State security officials arrested a university student for “providing intelligence” to a foreign correspondent based in Peking, China said Sunday.

The student, Lin Jie of Tianjin University, was accused of “secret collusion” with Lawrence MacDonald, an American reporter working for Agence France-Presse, the French news agency.

MacDonald, 32, of San Luis Obispo, Calif., broke the story about the student protests last month at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, which sparked a monthlong series of demonstrations in other cities.

Afraid To Be Seen

The arrest is likely to further discourage contacts between students and foreign news organizations. During the demonstrations, many students were afraid to be seen talking with foreign correspondents. Those who were willing to talk did so only on the condition that their names would not be used.

Authorities did not say whether action will be taken against MacDonald. Reports have been circulating in Peking for several days that China is preparing to expel an unnamed foreign correspondent. MacDonald was in Hong Kong on Sunday on his way back to China from a week’s vacation, and he stayed on there for the night.

The two-paragraph announcement of the arrest, issued by the official New China News Agency, did not say what sort of intelligence the student is supposed to have given MacDonald. It also did not explain why a university student would have access to intelligence information.

“Conclusive evidence has been obtained by the Tianjin bureau of state security through investigation,” the announcement said. China’s Ministry of State Security was set up in 1983 along the lines of the Soviet KGB.

In the past, China has interpreted the concept of “intelligence information” in very broad terms to discourage contacts between Chinese and foreigners. State regulations classify as secret any official information that is not authorized for release.

The most serious case was the 1979 prosecution of China’s best-known political dissident, Wei Jingsheng. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in jail for making counterrevolutionary statements and divulging military secrets to a foreign correspondent.

The information in question included casualty figures during the first week of China’s 1979 war with Vietnam. He is still in jail.

Earlier Incident

In 1982, an American researcher in Peking was first charged with espionage and then deported after Chinese officials claimed that she had state secrets in her possession. U.S. officials said the materials in question were routine tracts on Chinese agricultural policy.

A spokesman for Agence France-Presse said Sunday night that the agency has no information about the case beyond what was carried by the New China News Agency.

MacDonald, who is fluent in Chinese, also helped, along with two other reporters, to break the story last summer that an official from China’s Ministry of State Security had defected to the West.

Last summer, China expelled a correspondent of the New York Times, John F. Burns, after detaining him for six days for questioning about a motorcycle trip that he made in a restricted area.