Copyright 1982 , Ltd.    
Reuters North European Service 
September 8, 1982, Wednesday 

DATELINE: Peking, Sept 8 

Police held an American Journalist and a Chinese-Canadian woman friend all night in his hotel room because they believed she was a local Chinese citizen.

Collen Leung told Reuters today Chinese police has interrogated her and her friend Jim Laurie, Peking Correspondent of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), after they returned together to his suite from a party last Saturday night.

Miss Leung, who is from Vancouver, said she had frequently been harassed when entering hotels and stories intended mainly for foreigners and guards often refused to believe she was not a local Chinese.

She said that police had insisted she must be Chinese even after she showed them her passport.

They confiscated the passport and the card accrediting Mr. Laurie as a Journalist in China and did not return them until yesterday, she added. 


Another foreign Journalist, Robert Hurst of Canadian Television (CTV), and his Cameraman Gary Duberovolsky, where held for two hours when they tried to film public security officials returning the documents to Mr. Laurie and Miss Leung.

There was no immediate official Chinese comment on the incident involving Mr Laurie and Miss Leung.

With gumshoes posted on a nearby rooftop and decoys sent to stake out the scene, officials of the pricey Jianguo Hotel figured they had uncovered a dangerous case of bourgeois corruption on their fourth floor shortly after midnight last Sunday. 

They were poised to catch red-handed what they thought was a local woman visiting a Westerner in his off-limits hotel suite. 

But when the intrepid hotel night manager and six retainers sprung their trap, they found instead resident ABC News correspondent Jim Laurie, 35, drinking a glass of mineral water with a Canadian -Chinese friend, Colleen Leung, 27. 

Not easily scared off the scent, the house dicks rejected Leung's Canadian passport as "invalid" and, sniffing in disgust, accused the American newsman of harboring a Chinese local in his cushy, split-level quarters. 

At 3 a.m., they returned with a posse of 10, including several plainclothesmen who reviewed  identification papers again and renewed the dark suspicions. After they were joined an hour later by three uniformed investigators, Peking's finest turned a case of mistaken identity into a full-blown probe. 

For the next three hours, the lawmen interrogated Laurie and Leung separately, scolded Laurie for being arrogant when he asked to call the U.S. Embassy, directed him to write a confession and finally seized his press credentials and Leung's disputed passport. At noon yesterday, the case--known among foreigners here as the "Jianguo shakedown" -- ended in downtown police headquarters with Laurie fined $21 for violating an obscure 1964 "aliens" regulation requiring foreigners residing in Chinese hotels to register their guests. 

The incident is the latest example of the great lengths to which Chinese authorities go to separate their subjects -- or suspected ones -- from foreigners living in this capital city of 10 million people. 

Peking has isolated its foreign community ever since traders and missionaries penetrated the Middle Kingdom in the 17th century and were forced to live outside the city gates. Three hundred years later, the quarantine policy has become more complicated -- some say more pressing -- as China admits a diverse group of students, businessmen, scholars, diplomats and journalists. 

With their shiny cars and open lifestyles, foreigners present an attractive contrast to the gray Chinese existence. This causes difficulties for a Communist regime trying to balance rising popular expectations with a tottering economy, and it stimulates the traditional impulse to keep foreigners behind high walls. 

Officials enforce a strict isolation policy today by restricting foreigners to certain housing complexes and hotels -- like the modernistic Jianguo -- that are out-of-bounds to local Chinese. 

For Pekingites, a foreign friendship is almost certain to attract the attention of the dreaded public security police. Common workers are warned in political study sessions to beware of foreigners who are out to steal state secrets and corrupt them with loose morals. 

Chinese authorities have dramatized their commitment to the isolation policy by cracking down on a number of relationships they deemed to be illicit. 

Last year, the 25-year-old fiancée of a French diplomat who had been living with him in a foreign compound was arrested and sentenced to two years in a "reeducation through labor" camp. 

In June, an American teacher was detained for nearly a week in a Peking jail and finally expelled from China after she was accused of obtaining secret documents from Chinese friends -- several of whom also were arrested. 

Officials kidnapped an Inner Mongolian dancer who had been engaged to a Canadian before eventually approving the marriage last year and allegedly drove a young African and his Chinese lover to suicide by refusing to grant their marriage request in late 1980. 

Often, the policy falls hardest on overseas Chinese from North America, Europe and Southeast Asia who live in foreign compounds and shop in foreigner-only stores under a constant cloud of surveillance and uncertainty. 

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