HONG KONG — At 81 years old and after decades imprisoned in labor camps as a foe of the Communist Party, the Beijing writer and underground publisher Tie Liu had said that he was too old to seriously worry the security police anymore. But they raided his home over the weekend and detained him on a charge of “creating a disturbance,” his wife and friends said on Monday.

In the dark of early Sunday, the police banged on the door of Mr. Tie’s house in a suburb of eastern Beijing, handed him a summons, made him dress and then led him away, his wife, Ren Hengfang, said in a telephone interview. Officers searched their home, hauling away four laptop computers, an iPad and his cellphone, as well as piles of books and periodicals, many of them privately published by Mr. Tie, she said.

“He asked, ‘What disturbance have I been stirring up?’ and they said, ‘You’ll find out when it’s time to find out,'” Ms. Ren said. “We’d warned him to think twice before publishing his essays, but he’s a stubborn character.”

Later on Sunday, the police put Mr. Tie under criminal detention, allowing them to hold him for at least 30 days, Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer who has been his friend for many years and has followed his case, said in a telephone interview. Ms. Ren said the police also detained Huang Jing, Mr. Tie’s domestic helper, who also helped his publishing, on suspicion of “creating a disturbance.” Nobody would answer questions at the detention center where his wife said Mr. Tie was being held.

Mr. Tie is among the oldest, if not the oldest, Chinese dissenters recently detained for “creating a disturbance,” one of the vague, capacious charges that the government has increasingly used against critics of the party, said Mr. Liu, the lawyer. Mr. Tie could be released on bail or with a warning, but the move shows how far the government of Xi Jinping, the president and party leader, is willing to go to stifle dissent, Mr. Tie’s friends said.

“It’s virtually unheard of for someone of his age to be put under criminal detention for something he wrote,” Mr. Liu said. “When I asked him before if he worried about trouble, he said the most they’d do is question or warn him.”

Not that Mr. Tie had grown mild in his old age. He has been a vigorous, argumentative embodiment of links joining China’s current generation of dissidents to earlier generations of persecuted intellectuals. He was purged as a “Rightist” in 1957 and became a prolific private publisher of memoirs of other, aging victims of Mao’s purges and campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s.

“There’s naturally a continuity,” said Hu Jia, a prominent Beijing dissident who is the son of former Rightists. “My parents and their generation of Rightists had experiences and views that you would never find in the People’s Daily or a classroom, and many of them passed them down.”

Despite his vehement criticism of the Communist Party, Mr. Tie had nursed hopes that the current leader, Mr. Xi, would eventually use his growing power to lead China in a more liberal direction, a hope ridiculed by many other dissidents, Mr. Hu said. But Mr. Tie’s detention was probably related to an essay he recently published denouncing Liu Yunshan, Mr. Xi’s trusted subordinate in charge of ideology and propaganda, Ms. Ren said.

Mr. Tie’s real name is Huang Zerong, although he is universally known by his pen name, which means something like “Iron Flow.” (The pen name was possibly inspired by a character in a Soviet-era Russian novel, Ms. Ren said.) He was born in 1933 in southwest China, and he traveled from ardent revolutionary youth to persecution and then disillusionment in the party, she said.

In 1957, when he was a reporter and budding author, Mr. Tie was denounced with the Rightist label, used for people who took up Mao’s invitation to vigorously criticize the party’s policies and then found themselves cast as counterrevolutionary foes of Mao. Mr. Tie spent nearly a quarter of a century in labor camps, often famished and fearful, until he was politically rehabilitated in 1980, an experience recorded in his memoirs.

Mr. Tie made a living in journalism and public relations, and in recent years devoted himself to publishing books and pamphlets of memoirs of other former Rightists and people persecuted under Mao. Such memoirs are banned in China, but Mr. Tie’s dozens of books and booklets, cheaply printed and unadorned, circulated among friends, former Rightists and historians, an antidote to the party’s silence about Mao’s misdeeds.

Ms. Ren said there was a menacing incident before her husband’s detention. On Saturday morning the couple found someone had used laced meat to poison their dog, a large cross between a Tibetan mastiff and other breeds that Mr. Tie had named Mao Mao, in ironic tribute to Mao Zedong. She denied that neighbors could have killed the dog, and she suspected hard-left supporters of Mao, who have long loathed Mr. Liu and sent him threatening messages on his phone.

“He was too naïve,” she said of her husband. “Before this happened, he said they couldn’t do much against someone like him. He thought that at worst he’d be invited to drink tea,” she said, referring to a common phrase for informal interrogation, sometimes really over tea, by the state security police.