A banned Chinese writer has fled to the USA amid fears she was going to be arrested as part of a new media purge in China.
Ms He Qinglian said she was convinced that state security forces were building a case against her that would have lead to her arrest at customs as she left for a sabbatical in the United States.
The writer's departure comes amid a media crackdown in which publications have been told they face instant closure if they step outside a series of new guidelines. Articles criticising the Communist Party or its leaders or calling for reform are banned under the rules.
The guidelines also say that newspapers can no longer report independently on sensitive issues, such as corruption and natural disasters, but must turn to the State news agency, Xinhua, for their information. A number of papers have been shut down in recent weeks.
Ms He claimed yesterday that she was under heavy surveillance ahead of her trip to the US and her apartment was broken into several times.
She is the author of Pitfalls of Modernization in which she wrote that 20 years of market reforms, started by the late Deng Xiaoping, resulted in the looting of state property and a society of haves and have-nots.
Within two years of the publication of the book in 1998 she had been sidelined to the research department of her newspaper in the southern industrial city of Shenzhen. An unofficial ban on publishing her work became official in December.
In the past two months, a newspaper in Guangdong's was reprimanded for publishing an article based on an interview with He.
Meanwhile China most controversial newspaper, the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend, is being overhauled through a series of senior editorial replacements and new editorial policies. The shakeup is on the orders of the Communist Party's Propaganda Department, and is expected to result in one of the newspapers founders, Mr Jiang Yiping, being ejected from the Southern Weekend offices.
Recently the deputy news editor at the paper and the front page news editor , were forced to step down after the publication of a story on rural unrest.
Yesterday 300 magazine chiefs were summoned to a meeting in Beijing with the State Press and Publications Administration (PPA), the body which regulates the media.
The editors were told there was a shake-up going on with small newspapers and periodicals. A similar session with newspaper editors is due to take place in early August.