Ching Cheong, 55, chief China correspondent for the paper, was detained on April 22 in the southern city of Guangzhou and authorities were preparing to charge him with "stealing core state secrets," his wife Mary Lau told AFP.

"It's because of Zhao Ziyang ... China is trying to prevent the manuscript from being published. They think it's very sensitive," Lau said from Hong Kong, where Ching was based.

The manuscript recorded interviews conducted by Zong Fengming, a former Xinhua news agency reporter who had rare access to Zhao before his death in January.

Zhao, a former premier and secretary general of the Communist Party, was purged in 1989 after opposing the decision to use force to quell the six-week-long Tiananmen Square democracy protests that year.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters and citizens were killed during the crackdown and Zhao spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Zhao had no access to his former close associates but Zong was able to see him as a qigong, or Chinese meditation master.

Zong had published a memoir last year in which he briefly quoted from his interviews with Zhao and indicated he was preparing a second book titled Conversations with Zhao Ziyang in House Arrest, the Washington Post said.

Lau told AFP Ching was the first journalist to gain access to Zong's memoirs and write about Zhao's remarks.

She said Zong's editor had asked her husband to help him take the manuscript for the second book out of mainland China so it could be published.

Her husband had been trying for months to obtain the manuscript and had failed to receive it by email several times, she said.

"He went to Guangzhou thinking he would get the manuscript from a mediator, but we believe he was set up," Lau said.

"I was told as soon as he was handed the manuscript -- which might not have been the real thing -- at a hotel, state security officers immediately detained him."

She was later told that authorities were preparing to charge him with stealing state secrets, a charge the government often uses to stop people from, or punish them for, accessing information it considers too sensitive.

Zhao's inside knowledge of what led to the decision by Chinese leaders to order troops to open fire on the Tiananmen Square demonstrators would be explosive material in China.

Details of that bloody chapter in Chinese history are still banned from Chinese media and school textbooks.

Chinese officials did not comment Monday.

A spokesman for Singapore Press Holdings, the publisher of the Straits Times, said Chinese officials informed the company Ching was being detained.

"We have been told by a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Singapore that Ching Cheong is assisting security authorities in Beijing with an investigation into a matter not related to the Straits Times," the spokesman said.

Singapore's foreign ministry said it had not been contacted by China.

Ching is a permanent resident of Singapore but a Hong Kong citizen.

His arrest may be part of a broader investigation to keep the manuscript from being made public.

The Washington Post reported that Zong, the Xinhua reporter, confirmed the government had pressured him not to publish a book based on his conversations with Zhao.

He was cited as saying he had not finalized the manuscript and expressed surprise that Ching might have been detained for trying to obtain it, denying ever meeting him in person.

Lau said she received a phone call from her husband a day after he was detained, in which he asked for his laptop computer to be taken to mainland China. It was unclear what the authorities wanted to do with information from his computer.

China has deported foreign journalists for accessing politically sensitive information but generally refrains from jailing them.

"We hope he will be safely returned," Lau said of her husband.

                                                      Home