From Asia Sentinel:
On Jan. 16, Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong passed his thousandth day in a Chinese prison on espionage charges. There is little sign that he will be released despite some hope that Beijing could relent in advance of the 2008 Olympics.
The China correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, Ching was lured across the border with a promise of access to secret memoirs written by former Communist party boss Zhao Ziyang, who was deposed after the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989.
Ching had worked for a pro-communist newspaper in Hong Kong prior to 1989 and had been a supporter of Zhao, who died in January 2005. Ching, who was known to be searching for the memoirs, was arrested in Guangzhou on April 22, 2005 and charged with spying for a foreign intelligence agency. Five hundred days later, he was found guilty of spying in a closed trial and sentenced to five years in prison with no credit for time served.
