Campaigners for press freedom were using Clinton’s scheduled presence at an internet conference in China this weekend — at which Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang was also expected — to highlight the plight of Shi Tao, a 37-year-old financial journalist.

A text of the judgment issued by a court in the city of Changsha, central China, showed that Yahoo! handed over evidence crucial to Shi’s conviction.

His crime was to send an e-mail to exiled democracy advocates in America disclosing the contents of a Communist party document outlining restrictions on the media.

It ordered Chinese journalists to beware “risks to stability” posed by the return of dissidents to China on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The co-operation of Yahoo! with the Chinese state prosecutors has prompted a wave of protests around the world.

This weekend’s conference, in the city of Hangzhou, should have been a celebration of recent investment by Yahoo! of almost $1 billion in the Chinese internet trader Alibaba.com. Instead, journalists campaigning on Shi’s behalf hoped to turn it into an embarrassment for Yang, who was born in Taiwan but raised in the US, and for his company.

“It’s drawn media attention to the issue of corporate responsibility,” said Julien Pain, who monitored the case for Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based press freedom group that revealed the role of Yahoo!.

The group has urged Clinton to speak out for Shi and to defend freedom of speech on the internet. Clinton has stoutly defended western concepts of personal liberty during his visits to China.

The Shi case casts a fascinating light on the mentality and methods of the people who run China, one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

The indictment started with an account of a meeting of editorial executives at Shi’s newspaper, the Contemporary Business News, in Changsha on the evening of April 20, 2004.

The paper’s editors called together a group of journalists to hear a summary of a document with the innocuous title A Notice Regarding Current Stabilising Work. It cautioned against publishing anything that might lead to trouble on the Tiananmen Square anniversary.

So secret was this routine warning deemed to be that the journalists were forbidden to write it down. But, according to the prosecution, “defendant Shi . . . secretly did take notes”.

That night, when most of his colleagues had left the office, he logged onto the internet using his account: huoyan1989 @yahoo.com.cn.

Using the numerical alias “198964”, he sent e-mail messages to a Chinese exile named Hong Zhesheng, who ran a democracy forum website from America.

“Shi Tao leaked this information to an overseas hostile element,” declared the prosecution. The contents of the “notice” then appeared on websites and bulletin boards read by millions of Chinese at home and abroad.

The court documents say “account holder information provided by Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd” identified the telephone number in the newspaper office from which Shi had logged on.

Yahoo! defended its action, stating: “Yahoo! must ensure that its sites operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.”

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