China said today that a detained journalist for an English-language newspaper has admitted spying for a foreign intelligence agency, but did not identify the agency or detail the accusations against the Hong Kong-based reporter.

Ching Cheong, 55, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, was arrested in the southern city of Guangzhou on April 22 on suspicion of spying, the Foreign Ministry said. He had been trying to obtain a copies of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Mr Ching, considered the doyen of China correspondents, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to face charges in China. His wife, Mary Lau, said: "He told me that he expected to be shut up for a long time. It seems they suspect him of stealing state secrets."

"Ching Cheong confessed: following instructions from a foreign intelligence agency, he engaged in intelligence gathering activities in China and received a large spying fee," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a written statement.

Asked at a news conference for details of what Mr Ching was accused of doing and for which country he was accused of spying, the ministry's spokesman, Kong Quan, would say only, "We have full evidence to support this case." He denied that Mr Ching’s detention was related to Zhao.

Mr Ching’s detention is evidence of the tight state grip on the media in China, which last year, according to the New York-based Committee to Protest Journalists, was holding 42 journalists in its jails. A spokesman for Singapore Press Holdings, publisher of The Straits Times, said: "Ching Cheong has served us with distinction as a very well-informed correspondent and analyst. We have no cause to doubt that . . . he has conducted himself with the utmost professionalism." Mrs Lau said that she believed her husband’s arrest was linked to his interest in the manuscript of secret interviews with Zhao compiled by his doctor, who had rare access to a man kept incommunicado for the last 14 years of his life. She believed that her husband was lured into a trap by security officials.

The authorities are worried that Zhao’s inside knowledge of the decision to order troops to open fire on the 1989 demonstrators in Tiananmen Square might become public. The leader opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Untold hundreds died when troops moved in to break up the student-led demonstration. Zhao, who died in January, was deposed as general secretary and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

"I think he was set up," Mrs Lau said. The maximum penalty for selling state secrets is death.

Mr Ching had been covering China for 31 years and had many government contacts. He worked for 15 years for Wen Wei Po, a Hong Kong newspaper with close ties to the Communist Party, but resigned after the 1989 crackdown.

Mr Ching gained respect for breaking stories, particularly on internal decisions of the Communist Party, and for his insights into Chinese politics. China has never jailed a journalist working for a foreign publication. It usually detains them briefly and deports them on charges such as spying.

The last foreign journalist to be held was Anthony Grey, of the Reuters news agency, a Briton incarcerated for two years in his home in Beijing at the height of the Cultural Revolution. However, Chinese and Hong Kong nationals have been sent to prison. In April a former editor of Contemporary Business News in the southern Hunan province was sentenced to ten years for passing state secrets to an unidentified overseas publication. In 1994 Xi Yang, a Hong Kong citizen and reporter for the city’s Ming Pao newspaper, was jailed for 12 years for stealing state secrets — gold output figures and changes in interest rate policy.

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