Political activist and constitutional scholar Yao Lifa is missing, according to his wife, who said she had been informed that he may have been kidnapped.
"I got a call today from someone I don't know, who said he was a security guard in a hotel in Nanchang," said Yao's wife, Feng Ling, from the couple's home in Qianjiang city in the central province of Hubei.
"He said he had picked up a note calling for help on the floor of the hotel, saying that someone had been kidnapped by six people."
"It asked the person who found it to call this number and tell me," Feng said.
She said the note had been found in the Bairui Lijiang Hotel near Bayi Road near the Nanchang long-distance bus station. Nanchang is the capital of southwestern Jiangxi province.
Feng said the kidnapping report came after the principal of the school where Yao worked had approached him for a "chat," warning him to get the approval of the school before taking any trips.
"Yao Lifa didn't take any notice and went [to Nanchang] anyway, so you could say that this is a kind of punishment," she said.
Previously detained
Yao, a former delegate to the Qianjiang municipal People's Congress and a vocal civil rights campaigner, is frequently held under house arrest or short-term detention around sensitive political events and anniversaries.
But it wasn't immediately clear whether the police were directly involved in his disappearance before the lunar new year.
Feng said she was injured after police officers pushed her when she went to the police station to complain.
"I went to see the police and asked them ... why Yao Lifa hadn't come home since Monday," said Yao's wife Feng Ling. "They said he had gone home."
"I asked them for proof, because there's no one at home right now," Feng said.
She said four policemen had manhandled her out of the police station after that.
"They told me to get lost," she said. "Then they started pushing me around."
Feng said she had sustained bruising on her spine as a result of the scuffle.
An employee who answered the phone at the police department in Yao's hometown of Qianjiang said he had never heard of Yao Lifa.
Reported by Sun Jian for RFA's Mandarin service, and by Lin Jing for the Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.