Where's Gao?

Gao failed to return to a Beijing apartment last week after his trip to Urumqi, where repression is severe. Gao telephoned his father-in-law as his plane left Urumqi, saying he would call again upon his arrival in Beijing. He never did.

Associates say the government has disappeared him and that the decision to allow him reappear in public was  a PR ploy to the outside world, showing  that he was alive.

"Now we understand that the freedom was arranged by the authorities just for a show," Jiang Tianyong, a Beijing lawyer and rights activist told the NYTimes by  telephone. "He is missing again; he is still under their control. We must continue to pay attention to his case."

An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the organization was "seriously concerned" for Mr. Gao's safety.

"It's a matter of serious concern when he loses contact with his family and friends," the organization's deputy director for Asia and Pacific programs, Catherine Baber, said.

Mr. Gao,  is one of the nation's best-known activists who has remained an irritant to Chinese authorities.

In the early 2000s he worked on behalf of practitioners of Falun Gong, which Chinese authorities say is an antigovernment sect.

H was stripped of his law license and sentenced to prison in late 2006 on charges of inciting subversion after writing to President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, accusing the government of persecuting Falun Gong members, 

On his released, Mr. Gao said he had been tortured, but warned that discussing his torture publicly would result in his murder.

 "There is no such thing as him being tortured," China's foreign minister, Yang Jiechi responded.

Last year his wife and two children escaped from China, and  gained asylum in the United States.

In a telephone interview with The New York Times, he said he had given up his work as a human rights defender and merely sought "to calm down and lead a quiet life."

He refused to say whether he had suffered mistreatment while in captivity. In an April 7 interview with The Associated Press, he said simply, "I don't have the capacity to persevere."

The South China Morning Post, based in Hong Kong,  first reported Gao's disappearance on Friday, saying he was "quite outspoken" during an April 6 interview in his Beijing apartment, despite the near certainty that security agents were secretly recording his conversation.

The article said he had asked that details of his treatment by the authorities while in captivity not be made public. "If this is reported," he was quoted as saying, "I'll disappear again."