Irony, thy name is Singapore!

Marx once quipped that history repeats itself. First as tragedy, second as farce. The recent arrest of Singapore Straits Time's reporter, Ching Cheong, carries echoes of both. While the denouncements of China's imprisonment of the Straits Times reporter have rung loud and clear, illuminating the tragedy, few have noticed the delicious irony that the entire case represents.

Singapore's response to the arrest has been telling. Forbes reports that Singapore Press Holdings has issued relatively mild concern over the arrest but have not requested his release.

SINGAPORE (AFX) - Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (SPH) expressed shock after the Chinese authorities said that they had arrested one of the firm's most senior foreign correspondents for alleged espionage.

The Chinese foreign ministry said Ching Cheong, the chief China correspondent for SPH title The Straits Times, was detained on April 22 in the southern city of Guangzhou 'for being involved in espionage'.

'We are shocked by this new accusation,' SPH said in a statement.

SPH said: 'We have no cause to doubt that in all the years that Ching Cheong has worked with us, he has conducted himself with the utmost professionalism.

The first irony is that the Singapore Straits Times is the state-owned English daily newspaper that serves as the mouthpiece of the government. That’s not to say the news is inaccurate, but more appropriately the news is filtered via the directive of the PAP and the government. Similarly the reporters of the Straits Times are nearly universally careerists who will not challenge the status quo of reporting or the government. The state of censorship in Singapore assures that. Although China ranks a repressive 162 in press freedom ranks according to Reporters Sans Frontieres, spunky can-do Singapore never one to be outdone, weighs in at an impressive 147.

There are a few details about the Singapore Straits Times and more importantly its parent company, Singapore Press Holdings that some may not be aware of. The major figures in these organizations all have considerable ties to not only the state, but also its security and intelligence gathering apparatus. Literally, one can both order the arrests of Singapore's journalists one minute, and then be the editorial chief of a major paper the next. God certainly has a sense of humor.

An article dated 2001 from the Australian sheds some light onto just who runs Singapore’s media establishment.

I'm sitting in the tiny office of Cheong Yip Seng, editor-in-chief of Singapore's The Straits Times. And he's waxing lyrical about the paper and its contribution to the tiny South-East Asian nation that he's seen leap from Third World slum to First World wonder.

Cheong, 57, has been with the paper since 1963. He's proud of the paper and its contribution to modern Singapore. And he's proud, too, of the former intelligence operatives in his newsroom.

There's Chua Lee Hoong, the ST's most prominent political columnist. She might be Singapore's Maureen Dowd, except The New York Times's Dowd didn't work with the secret police for nine years. There's Irene Ho on the foreign desk. She was also an "analyst" with Singapore's intelligence services. So, says Cheong, was Susan Sim, his Jakarta correspondent.

And there's Cheong's boss, Tjong Yik Min. From 1986 to 1993, Tjong was Singapore's most senior secret policeman, running the much feared Internal Security Department, a relic of colonial Britain's insecurities about communism in its Asian empire. Now Tjong is a media mogul, the executive president of SPH, Singapore's virtual print media giant, which controls all but one of the country's newspapers.

Truth be told, it wouldn't be altogether unbelievable that the man Chinese authorities detained was indeed an intelligence agent. Although the official motivation for the arrest stands that Ching Cheong was collecting sensitive documents regarding the disgraced Zhao Zhiyang.