As Olympics Near, China's Most Famous Dissident is Imprisoned

As far as Hu Jia was concerned, the door to his apartment was always open to fellow Chinese who shared his desire for greater freedom, foreign friends, or activists with issues to discuss.

But it was always a question of when, not if, the Communist Party would lock up Mr. Hu, China's most famous dissident, who has been under house arrest for many months, guarded by state security officers.

Yesterday Mr. Hu, 34, was transformed into one of the world's most famous human rights defenders as China moved to stifle dissent before the Olympic Games in Beijing. He was jailed by a Beijing court for three and a half years for "inciting to subvert state power" through a series of articles about freedom and for his constant dialog with foreign journalists.

Mr. Hu would not have been surprised by the jail sentence. One of the last things he said to me defiantly after I interviewed him while he was under house arrest last year was: "I'm ready that the next step after house arrest will be jail."

Getting in to see Mr. Hu in his apartment complex, which is called Bobo Freedom City, involved flashing your press pass at the police who ran alongside your car as you entered the compound. Then you had to pick your way around groups of police officers playing cards in the stairwell and standing around outside the apartment block, smoking and chatting idly, or hassling Mr. Hu's wife, Zeng Jinyan, as she left for work.

Despite the constant surveillance, Mr. Hu kept a blog on an overseas website called Boxun. The prosecutors had 4kg of documents in evidence against him -- this was never going to end well for him.

Mr. Hu seems fearless. He has spoken out on Aids, Tibetan autonomy and free speech, while embracing the causes of the activist lawyer Gao Zhisheng, and Chen Guangcheng, a blind rural campaigner who has been jailed for four years.

He sometimes gives an impression of naivety. How can he survive? Long a thorn in the side of the Beijing government, the authorities say his case exemplifies how Western media are obsessed with human rights and other negative aspects of China's rise, while not paying enough attention to the progress made.

While the sentence is lighter than many in the human rights community feared, Mr. Hu's conviction for criticizing the Communist Party is likely to become a cause célèbre among rights activists, alongside the issue of Tibet, ahead of the Olympic Games. By formally jailing him, the authorities may have created a monster, a poster boy for the critics of the Communist Party's strict controls on dissent and protest.

Mr. Hu, an amiable, slight figure, who suffers from Hepatitis B, was carted off by state security police in late December after he had already spent more than 200 days under house arrest. He and his wife and their six-week-old daughter, Hu Qianci, were at home around Christmas time with Ms. Zeng's grandmother when 20 policemen burst in, cut their telephone lines and internet connection and arrested Mr. Hu. Ms Zeng and the baby remain under house arrest, and she left the courtroom yesterday visibly upset, before being taken home in a police van.

Speaking on the telephone recently, she told of how she was only allowed out a couple of times to take baby Qianci to the clinic for check-ups, but she wasn't allowed out to walk the child. Mr. Hu's sister and parents were keeping them supplied. She was furious and frustrated at her plight. Both of them are proud that the Olympics are being hosted by Beijing, but they think the Games have been hijacked.

"These Games are for the Chinese Communist Party and they violate the basic human rights of Chinese people," she said.

Living under house arrest was difficult for an energetic figure such as Mr. Hu, who spent so much of his time on the road defending the causes dear to his heart. The walls of his apartment are covered with still-life drawings, and a DVD boxed set of Friends on the coffee table bears testament to the tedium of imprisonment. In a basket on the table sat a pharmacy of medicines ranging from vitamins to kidney treatments.