He said local officials stopped him as soon as he arrived and kept him waiting for about an hour as they took down his team’s details and videoed them. When he insisted on moving on, he counted 11 people following him.

“Whenever we stopped to talk to people, at least eight of them surrounded us and said something in Cantonese to those we tried to speak to so no-one would talk.”

After he left, a car followed him all the way back to Guangzhou. A local source told the BBC that one man was held incommunicado this summer for 26 days after speaking to a foreign journalist.

He went there to confirm reports of renewed protests in the village where two years ago three men were shot and killed in demonstrations against government land acquisition. At the time, residents said the government gave them inadequate compensation for land taken to build an electric power plant. In December 2007, Radio Free Asia reported that about 1,000 riot police fired tear gas at protesters in Dongzhou. Residents were reluctant to speak about the protests to a foreign correspondent.

Foreman said while he was walking down a narrow side street lined with shops, four plainclothes officers in a marked police car grabbed him by the arm and put him in the car without saying what he had done wrong. At the police station, after 30 minutes, a vice director of the propaganda department of the local communist party committee showed up. He wanted to see Foreman’s passport and press card. He also wanted to know to whom he had talked and what they said. (Foreman said he couldn’t understand anyone because they spoke in dialect).

Foreman brought up the new media guidelines, and the official said the law allows local governments to declare that certain places are off limits because of security concerns. Another official said reporters would probably be allowed to return to Dongzhou by February. After an hour, the authorities drove him to the closest big city, Shanwei, about a half hour away and checked him into a hotel.

Two police officers entered the office and demanded Zhang accompany them to the police station. They refused to say why. The police detained Zhang for several hours, during which they asked him the identity of the reporter, what story the reporter was working on, and how the reporter knew about the Labour Dispute Service Center, which helps migrant workers involved in legal disputes with factories.

Zhang was warned not to tell the foreigner “unnecessary things.” Zhang was able to meet Sillanpaa later that day. Zhang said police also intervened in March when he and some other labour rights defenders were interviewed by an Australian journalist