BEIJING — Two years after coming to power, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have staked out a two-pronged strategy for political control: projecting a kinder, gentler image while cracking down on those disseminating unauthorized information.
The news this week that a prominent Hong Kong journalist had been detained on spying charges, the third such case in nine months, is the latest entry on the hard side of the ledger, analysts say. Recent months have seen a series of actions against the media, scholars, Internet users and dissidents.
This contrasts with efforts by the Hu administration to burnish a down-to-earth image on other fronts, in part through such policies as cutting taxes for farmers and increasing local subsidies in hope of reducing the yawning gap between rich and poor.
Hu and Wen have also made symbolic gestures, such as Chinese New Year trips to eat dumplings with coal miners, shaking hands with an AIDS patient and ensuring that a migrant worker got paid.
"The Chinese expression is 'The soft get softer, the hard get harder,' " said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley. "They're trying to get closer to the grass roots in terms of people marginalized, to balance a bit the increasing wealth gap.
"But they're becoming even tighter on centralized, top-down controls," Xiao said. "Their media oversight, state security agency and propaganda machine are only getting stronger. It doesn't speak much for political reform."
The news that journalist Ching Cheong, working for the Straits Times of Singapore, had been detained surfaced this week, a month after he was jailed and days before Saturday's 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Ching, 55, entered China in April, reportedly to obtain a draft manuscript of interviews with the late Zhao Ziyang, a mainland leader who was ousted in 1989 for opposing the Tiananmen action.
Ching was detained by mainland authorities April 22 in his hotel in Guangzhou. He has not been formally charged nor has he had access to a lawyer or been allowed to see his family.
This week, Ching's wife went public about his detention after keeping silent for several weeks in the hope it would help win his release. She said the detention was a setup sparked by Beijing's extreme sensitivity over anything related to Zhao.
