China releases five dissidents

China, fighting to keep its favourable trading status with the United States, said it had released five more religious dissidents, Reuter reports from Peking. They are Chen Zhuman, Yan Peizhi, Xu Zhihe, Cui Tai and Zhang Li, the Xinhua news agency said.

But in Shanghai, police on alert for any dissent before the 4 June anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, arrested two dissidents earlier: Yang Zhou, a co-founder of the city's Association for Human Rights, and Yang Qinheng, a businessman jailed for two years during the Democracy Wall period of the late 1970s.