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Beijing holds US citizen on suspicion of spying for Taiwan

Chinese authorities are holding a US citizen whom they accused of spying for Taiwan.

A spokeswoman at the US embassy in Beijing said that its state security services detained Xie Chunren (謝春仁), a businessman of Chinese descent from New Jersey, on May 31 in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan Province.

Xie was being kept at a guesthouse under house arrest, which Chinese authorities often use to get around limits set on how long suspects can be held before formal charges are brought.

"He is currently under residential surveillance under suspicion of espionage for Taiwan," the US embassy spokeswoman said, adding that the US consulate in Chengdu was notified of Xie's detention on June 2.

US diplomats have been allowed to visit him three times since then.

His son, Xie Yuanyang (謝元楊), denied that his father was a spy. The son told the International Herald Tribune that he believed his father had mistakenly been caught up in an investigation of old acquaintance Wei Dong (魏東), another US citizen arrested by China in 2003 on charges of spying.

Xie Yuanyang told the newspaper that Dong and his father were not on good terms and, besides one encounter in 2000, had not seen each other in more than 10 years.

Xie Chunren's arrest came amid rising fears of infiltration within China's communist leadership and an expansion of Chinese investigations aimed at ferreting out suspected agents for Taiwan.

Two weeks ago, China also formally charged Ching Cheong (程翔), 55, a Hong Kong-based correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times newspaper, of spying for Taiwan after holding him for three months.

Both Ching's wife and Taiwan's government denied the charges.

Ching was detained when he was in China to collect transcripts of interviews with late Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽).

Zhao opposed China's bloody reaction to the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests. He was stripped of his party position and was put under house arrest from 1989 until his death early this year.
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