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Poet and editor Bei Ling arrested in China |
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August 13, 2000
BEIJING (AP) - Beijing police seized 2,000 copies of an independent literary journal and detained its editor, poet Bei Ling, a rights group and a friend said Saturday. Bei disappeared Friday, after he told friends he planned to hold a discussion forum to distribute and review the latest issue of his quarterly journal Tendency, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. On Friday evening, police seized 2,000 copies of the journal from a bar near Beijing University, the Hong Kong-based group said. A writer and friend of Bei's said police in Beijing's university district called her Saturday evening to say that he was in detention. They did not say why, she said. She refused to be identified. Bei did not return repeated calls to his pager Saturday. Police in the university district and in the force's foreign affairs office would not answer questions about Bei's arrest. Bei, 40, has lived in the United States for the past decade and has run into trouble before on trips back to China. In January 1994, he was stopped at Shanghai airport, searched and questioned for three hours. A few days later police in Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, police questioned him for three days about Tendency including one nine-hour interrogation session. Police previously told him that Tendency, an anthology of Chinese and Western literature that Bei publishes privately, has "political problems." The August issue included work by Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney as well as essays about underground Chinese literature, the Information Center said. Bei's friend said it also included an article by dissident literary critic Liu Xiaobo. |