Dissident’s U.S. Friend Is Expelled by Chinese : Ideology: The Harvard scholar is sent to Hong Kong. Former student leader Shen Tong is apparently still in custody.

Chinese police detained Harvard scholar Ross Terrill early Wednesday, then expelled him to Hong Kong for his involvement with the dissident former student leader Shen Tong.

Shen, the first exiled pro-democracy leader to return to China since the crackdown on the Tian An Men Square protests in 1989, was detained in Beijing early Tuesday, a few hours before he planned to speak at a news conference. He apparently was still in police custody late Wednesday evening, along with two other dissidents detained with him, Qi Dafeng and Qian Liyun.

Shen, 24, is a graduate student at Boston University and chairman of the U.S.-based Democracy for China Fund. Qi is a student leader from Tianjin who was imprisoned for 20 months for his role in the 1989 protests, and Qian is the wife of exiled student leader Xiong Yan, who now is in the United States.

Shen’s mother, Li Yixian, 51, said that she visited police offices Tuesday in an attempt to see her son.

“I told them that I had the right to see Shen Tong and that they had the duty to tell me why he was being held,” Li said. “The police ignored me. They refused to let me see Shen Tong. . . .”

Authorities on Tuesday expelled to Hong Kong two Paris-based French journalists who were detained with the three Chinese. Christophe Nick, a writer for the magazine Actuel, and free-lancer Pascal Giret had traveled with Shen after his arrival in China about a month ago.

Terrill, an author of books on China and a research fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, is a friend of Shen and an adviser to the Democracy for China Fund. He came to Beijing at Shen’s request, he said. After Shen was detained, Terrill, a U.S. citizen, gave reporters copies of the statement Shen had intended to make at his news conference.

Terrill was detained in his hotel room for about three hours Tuesday morning, after distributing Shen’s statement, and was then released. Police returned to his room shortly after midnight, he said in a telephone interview after his expulsion to Hong Kong.

“There were about five of them,” Terrill said. “They came in and said they wanted to have a talk with me, and the gist was that my activities in Beijing had not been compatible with visiting on a tourist visa, and therefore they were expelling me from China.”

Terrill said he was taken from the hotel via a side door and was faced with “30 or 40 police . . . as if I was going to pull a knife or a gun.”

He said he was driven to a hotel near Beijing’s airport, interrogated again and then allowed a few hours’ sleep. After daybreak he was driven to the airport, where a security officer videotaped him carrying his baggage to board the plane, he said.

During his month of freedom in China, Shen traveled to various places in the country, meeting with a broad range of people favoring reform, including government officials, intellectuals and dissidents. One of his main goals, he said in a conversation before he was detained, was to establish closer links between pro-democracy activists inside China and those in exile.

Shen was asked whether he thought there has been any relaxation of political controls in China over the past year. “There’s still repression everywhere,” he replied.