BEIJING, Dec 14, 2000 -- (Reuters) The United States is pressing China to free a U.S.-based Falun Gong member sentenced to three years in jail for documenting a crackdown on the spiritual movement, U.S. officials said.

U.S. diplomats in Beijing called for the release of 37-year-old Teng Chunyan in high-level meetings at the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Washington raised her case with the Chinese embassy, a U.S. official told Reuters.

A Beijing court sentenced Teng to three years in jail on Tuesday after convicting her of "spying for overseas organizations and illegally providing intelligence on the state", a Chinese cabinet spokesman said on Thursday.

A Hong Kong-based human rights group said Teng had been collecting evidence about the detention of Falun Gong members in a Beijing mental hospital.

"We've asked them to release her and return her to her family in the United States," a U.S. official said.

The United States issued repeated protests about Teng's case before the court verdict was announced.

U.S. officials were barred from attending the November trial, and although Beijing is obliged to grant U.S. diplomats access to American citizens arrested in China, Teng is a permanent resident rather than a full citizen of the United States.

Her husband is an American citizen.

A spokesman for the Chinese State Council, or cabinet, said Teng entered China in May on a private Chinese passport. She was tried by the No. 1 Intermediate People's Court in Beijing in November on suspicion of spying.

Falun Gong combines meditation and breathing exercises with a doctrine loosely rooted in Buddhist and Taoist teachings.

Practitioners have said some 50,000 followers have been detained and many sent to labor camps without trial.

The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy described Teng as an acupuncturist who taught at the New York Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

She emailed pictures out of China as part of her investigation into reports that Beijing authorities had committed 50 Falun Gong members to a mental institute in January, it said.

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