A JOURNALIST was jailed for five years on espionage charges yesterday, the latest step in a widening Chinese crackdown on the media and on dissent.

Ching Cheong, 56, a prominent Hong Kong reporter for a Singapore newspaper, was convicted of spying for Taiwan, the self-ruled island over which Beijing claims sovereignty. He had faced the death penalty but the Beijing Number Two Intermediate People’s Court said that it had shown leniency because Mr Ching had confessed.

His trial lasted for half a day on August 15. He Peihua, Mr Ching’s lawyer, said that they planned to appeal. The journalist’s family issued a statement saying: “The verdict has serious biases and only considered the views of the prosecution.”

Mr Ching was the the Hong Kong-based China correspondent for The Straits Times and a frequent visitor to China and Taiwan as part of his work as a journalist. Singapore Press Holdings Ltd, the parent company, urged China to consider freeing him on medical parole. It said: “As he is known to be suffering from high blood pressure and is not in the best of health, we appeal to the Chinese authorities to show him leniency and compassion.”

The court also deprived Mr Ching of his political rights for a year and confiscated property worth 300,000 yuan (£20,000).

His jailing came a week after a Chinese researcher for the New York Times was acquitted of espionage but jailed for three years for fraud. Also last week, a blind legal activist who had publicised forced abortions and sterilisations by family planning officials in eastern Shandong province was sentenced to four years and three months for disrupting traffic and damaging public property.

Mr Ching was detained in southern China in April last year and his wife said that he had travelled to the southern city of Guangzhou to collect documents related to Zhao Ziyang, the disgraced former leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

During the 1980s Mr Ching worked as a correspondent in Beijing for a Hong Kong newspaper closely linked to Beijing. He resigned after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when Zhao was deposed for sympathising with the students and kept under house arrest until his death last year.

China said that Mr Ching was found guilty of selling state secrets and intelligence to a Taiwanese foundation that was really a spy agency.

President Hu’s Government is engaged in a sustained effort to tighten control over media and information, seeing a more aggressive, freewheeling press as a threat to its authority. More than 32 Chinese journalists and some 50 internet essayists have been jailed, often on charges of violating vague secrecy or security laws.

Mr Ching, born in China, holds a passport of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as well as a British National (Overseas) passport issued in the waning days of British colonial rule. He is also a Singapore permanent resident.

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