Friends and supporters of the detained journalist Ching Cheong face an excruciating dilemma because the more they demonstrate their support, the more determined the mainland authorities are to persuade the world that he is not only guilty of serious crimes, but is also a bad person.

This is why the authorities have laced their accusations of espionage with allegations of venality, suggesting that Ching has greedily accumulated millions of dollars through his unlawful activities.

And the defamatory charges do not end there - they are accompanied by a black propaganda campaign to suggest that Ching was embroiled in an extramarital affair with Huang Wei, a mainland journalist.

Not one shred of evidence has been presented to substantiate the charges against Ching; nor is this likely to happen because he will almost certainly be tried behind closed doors.

But Huang, the other victim of the propaganda campaign - who was presumably expected to remain silent - has declined to do so. In a courageous move which is likely to cause her problems, she has flatly denied the existence of a sexual affair, while publicly asserting her belief in Ching's integrity.

Why are the authorities taking quite so much trouble, not only to blacken Ching Cheong's name but also to castigate his supporters? The answer is to be found in the fact that many of those asking questions about Ching's detention come, as he does, from the Beijing loyalist camp. They are not usually to be found questioning arrests on the mainland, but have done so because they know Ching well and find the charges hard to believe.

In some ways, their support for Ching sends a bad message to the people who arrested him, suggesting that maybe this time they went a little too far. But China's security services do not take well to being questioned, and have become more determined to make their case.

Ching, a staunch Chinese patriot, was among those close to the heart of the Communist Party in Hong Kong when he worked as a senior journalist for the Beijing-controlled Wen Wei Po newspaper and resigned following the crushing of the 1989 democracy protests.

This hardly placed him in the so-called anti-China camp, but it certainly made him a government critic. Authoritarian regimes have problems with all forms of criticism, but reserve their greatest loathing for those who were once true believers in the party line before starting to question it.

The bitter history of persecution of former faithful Communist Party members is long and often horrifying. Because the state maintains the fiction that these persecutions have nothing to do with politics, the victims are generally accused of all manner of crimes ranging from espionage to sabotage. Only the most blinkered apologists for the regime really believe that such charges reflect the real offense of the dissenters.

The precise reasons for Ching's arrest remain unclear, but it is widely believed that they are connected with his collection of materials concerning the deposed Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang. No one pretends that the documents in question are not politically sensitive, but there is quite a leap to be made from there to the accusations of espionage.

This is where Ching's dilemma started to descend into the realms of a Kafkaesque nightmare where double talk and intimidation distort reality. On Sunday Wang Rudeng, an assistant director of the Central Government Liaison Office, insisted that China was upholding the rule of law by arresting Ching. He went on to say everyone is equal before the law. One should not, because of one's profession, act outside what is permitted by the law and do something that damages national security.

Inadvertently, Wang has confirmed how China's system works. In places such as Hong Kong, where the rule of law remains intact, no government official would dream of speaking this way about a defendant before a trial. If they did they would certainly preface accusations with the word ``alleged'' because prejudging a case before it comes to court amounts to prejudicing a trial.

But in the mainland, there is not the smallest possibility of an espionage charge resulting in anything other than a conviction. If any readers can cite a single example of such charges being thrown out of a Chinese court, they must have powers of discovery well beyond the capacity of this columnist.

The brutal reality is that Ching will be tried, probably at great speed, and he will be convicted. As matters stand, he is still being denied access to legal representation. That is the true meaning of rule of law, Chinese-style.

This leaves Ching's supporters with the hope that the conviction will be followed by some display of magnanimity that will ensure his early release. Wang seems to suggest that, if they keep silent, this is more likely to happen. Yet silence has not helped other political prisoners in China, some of whom owe their lives to the noise their plights generated.

In this case, it remains uncertain which course of action is likely to achieve the desired result.