China frees dissident

SHANGHAI - A prominent Shanghai dissident, Bao Ge, has been freed from a Chinese labour camp, friends of his family said yesterday…

SHANGHAI - A prominent Shanghai dissident, Bao Ge, has been freed from a Chinese labour camp, friends of his family said yesterday.

Telephone lines to the family's Shanghai home had been cut and police had warned family members not to talk to journalists, a family friend said.

Mr Bao (33) had written to his family in May saying that he expected to be released on the eighth anniversary of China's June 4th, 1989, clampdown on prodemocracy demonstrations centred on Beijing's Tiananmen Square. He was sentenced in September 1994 to three years' detention.