A Chinese dissident who criticized authorities has been detained on charges of allegedly possessing state secrets, his mother and a human rights organization said Tuesday.
Huang Qi, founder of the human rights Web site 64Tianwang, was detained in the southwestern city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, his 74-year-old mother Pu Wenqing said.
"They didn't say when he would be freed, first they have to do an investigation," she said.
Pu said she is unable to talk to Huang, and was informed by the police of the arrest on Monday. Possession of state secrets is an ill-defined term often used to clamp down on dissent.
A man at the publicity department of the Chengdu public security bureau said they don't accept interviews and referred calls to the propaganda department. The phone went unanswered at the propaganda office of Chengdu Communist Party committee.
The watchdog group Human Rights in China said Tuesday that Huang was detained June 10 after visiting areas affected by a powerful May 12 earthquake centered in Sichuan and writing about parents who lost their children.
"This is another illustration of how a person who is only trying to help might find himself snared by China's state secrets laws," Executive Director Sharon Hom said in a statement. "This use of the law as a sword hanging over rights activists, like Huang Qi, contradicts the reported 'new media openness' in China following the Sichuan earthquake."
The Paris-based rights monitoring group Reporters Without Borders said last week that three men, likely agents from the Ministry of State Security, forced Huang to get into a car. It said his disappearance may be linked to articles he has posted criticizing the government's response to the magnitude-7.9 quake that killed almost 70,000 people in Sichuan.
China's security forces have begun to clamp down on dissent after initially tolerating independent reporting on the quake and allowing public complaints by parents who blame corruption and shoddy construction on school collapses that killed their children.
Huang has long been one of China's most outspoken activists. Earlier this decade, he served a five-year prison sentence on subversion charges linked to politically sensitive articles posted on his Web site.
Since his release in 2005, Huang, who is in his mid-forties, has supported a wide range of causes from aiding families of those killed in the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing, to publicizing the complaints of farmers involved in land disputes with authorities.
