Another Scholar Held in China, Rights Group Says

An academic with permanent Hong Kong residency has been held for nearly eight months in mainland China, the third detention of a Chinese intellectual to be uncovered in a month, a human rights group said Saturday.

China-born Xu Zerong, 45, a researcher specializing in China’s relations with Southeast Asia, has been detained in the southern city of Guangzhou since August, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in a statement.

The United States and China are already at odds over the six-week detention of U.S. resident Gao Zhan on espionage allegations.

Xu’s family has not been allowed to see him and does not know where he is, why he is detained or if he has been charged.

Xu, who holds a doctoral degree in politics from Britain’s Oxford University, moved to Hong Kong, where he gained permanent residency before becoming a researcher at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou.

His case came to light when the wife of Hong Kong-based American professor Li Shaomin, who has been locked up in mainland China for more than a month, said Saturday that she could not imagine why her husband would be detained.

A professor at Hong Kong’s City University, Li was detained Feb. 25 in the southern city of Shenzhen, said his wife, Liu Yingli.

Gao, a researcher at American University in Washington, was detained with her husband, Xue Donghua, and 5-year-old son, Andrew, as they were leaving Beijing on Feb. 11 after Chinese New Year celebrations. Father and son were sent home after 26 days.

Frank Lu of the rights center warned of an apparently growing number of detentions of Chinese intellectuals on the mainland.

“There are definitely more than these three. Other cases are still being investigated,” he said.

Lu did not rule out the possibility that recent detentions could be Beijing’s ploy to hit back at the disappearance of a Chinese military officer.

China said earlier this month that it was investigating the case of the unidentified military officer after a report in Taiwan’s United Daily News that a colonel in a military delegation to the United States and Canada last year had defected.

The report identified the officer as a member of the People’s Liberation Army general staff and part of a disarmament delegation who would have been able to provide Washington with intelligence on Beijing’s nonproliferation policies.