Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other groups, issued the appeal for Ching's release from custody in Beijing.

The Hong Kong-based China correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times was scheduled to be sentenced later this month and faces the death penalty.

Ching, 56, was arrested in April 2005 and later charged with espionage, according to Lucie Morillon, a US representative of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

"We are here today to call on the Chinese authorities to release (Ching) immediately. The charges are only a poor excuse to silence one more courageous journalist," Morillon said.

Ching was detained in Guangzhou where he had traveled to collect documents related to former Chinese Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang. His arrest is one of several detentions of reporters in China that have stoked international criticism.

In December 2005, lawyers for Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher taken into custody in 2004, said he would be put on trial charged with exposing state secrets. He faces 10 years in prison.

China is the world's leading jailer of journalists, with 32 in custody and another 50 Internet campaigners also in prison, Morillon said. "Their only crime is doing their job as journalists and trying to keep the Chinese people and the world informed," Morillon said.

Abi Wright, communications director with the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Ching's arrest was "a shot across the bow for Hong Kong journalists," who have been under increasing pressure from Beijing since the territory returned to China's control in 1997.

China considers self-ruled Taiwan part of its sovereign territory and insists on its eventual reunification.

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