The detained staff member was identified as Haze Fan, who is a Chinese national working as a news assistant in the Bloomberg News bureau in Beijing. Under Chinese law, Chinese nationals are only allowed to work as news assistants for foreign publications and are not allowed to conduct independent reporting.
Fan was last in contact with her editors by 11:30 am (3:30 am GMT) on Monday, the Bloomberg report said.
According to the report, started to work for Bloomberg in 2017 and had previously served other Western press, including CNBC, CBS News, Al Jazeera and Thomson Reuters.
In response to inquiries from Bloomberg News, Chinese authorities said Fan was detained on "suspicion of engaging in criminal activities that jeopardize national security."
An unnamed Bloomberg spokesperson expressed concerns over Fan’s detention and promised to continue to support her, the report said.
According to Bloomberg’s website, Fan mostly covered business stories in China ranging from the recent failed initial public offering (IPO) of Chinese financial service provider Ant Group to the debt crisis of Chinese property giant Evergrande. Fan’s last post on an Instagram account, apparently under her name, showed she celebrated Halloween with friends.
Amid rising geopolitical tensions between China and the United States, a growing number of US press have faced increased scrutiny in China. Bloomberg News was among the six US media outlets that were ordered to submit details of their staffing, finances and real estate of their China-based operations to Chinese authorities in October.
Chinese authorities argued that the crackdown on the US press in China was a reciprocal response to Washington’s hostility against Chinese state-owned media’s operations in the United States.
Earlier this year, China expelled American journalists from three US newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Amid bilateral tensions between China and Australia, Cheng Lei, a China-born Australian reporter working for the state-owned Chinese broadcaster CGTN, was detained in Beijing over similar national security charges in September.
In 2004, Zhao Yan, a Chinese researcher of the New York Times, was sentenced to three years in prison on fraud charges, after he was initially arrested for leaking state secrets. Zhao was released in 2007 after serving his three-year sentence.
