CHINA:Despite being under house arrest, human rights activist Hu Jia carries on his campaigns from his flat in Beijing. He told Clifford Coonanwhy.
At the home of prominent Chinese dissident Hu Jia, the four police officers are torn over whether to question the western journalist about to climb five flights of stairs, or to keep playing cards.
I climb the stairs to Hu's home unimpeded. Keen to improve its image a year before the Olympics in Beijing, the government has introduced new rules removing some of the reporting restrictions on foreign journalists. Correspondents no longer have to get official permission to do interviews and can travel freely in China - restive Tibet and Xinjiang excepted.
The new rules are a significant improvement and the government may even keep them beyond the Olympics, which would mark a huge step forward towards a more open and liberal China.
But Hu's plight, and that of many of his closest friends and allies, including the blind barefoot activist Chen Guangcheng and the crusading lawyer Guo Zhisheng, shows there is still a long way to go before China's human rights record is up to scratch.
A slight figure, Hu (33) smiles as he opens the door, warmly welcoming as he offers tea. The wall is covered with still life drawings, while there is a boxed set of the comedy series Friends on the coffee table and a pharmacy of medicines ranging from vitamins to kidney treatments. He has been under house arrest for 180 days and the DVDs and arts and crafts bear testament to his lack of freedom.
Hu is being held because of his friendship with two leading activists. One is Chen Guangcheng, who exposed a violent campaign of forced abortions and sterilisations by family planning officials and was jailed for four years and three months on trumped-up charges of disrupting traffic.
The other is Gao Zhisheng, who has represented clients who say their land has been seized by corrupt officials, followers of the banned Falun Gong movement and members of China's underground churches. He has sent open letters to Chinese leaders criticising government policies. "I've been held since July when I was stopped by public security officials en route to Shandong to see Chen. I was wearing a Chen Guangcheng T-shirt," he says.
Chen's recent retrial made no difference to his sentence, and a subsequent appeal has failed. As we speak Hu gets a phone call with the news that the appeal is over but he says "the struggle goes on".
"The police in Shandong province asked the security bureau here to arrest me because I had taken a digital video camera to gather evidence in Chen's case." In August he learned through friends that Gao Zhisheng, with whom Hu had helped organise a hunger strike and other activities, had been detained. He, too, was tried in recent months but had his sentence suspended on condition he cease his activism.
"So I'm being held under house arrest, I believe, for these two things - my links to Gao and my links to Chen. Because I'm seen as an organiser," he says.
For the first month, Hu couldn't leave the house at all.
"After I complained about this - after all, even a prisoner gets free time to walk around - I was allowed to walk around the compound here with four policemen accompanying me." Now he is allowed to go out, to do things like shop when his wife is away, but only with a police escort. "I believe this is an illegal detention, as I've been completely cut off. For three months everything was gone - the internet, all contacts, except my mobile phone," he says.
Nonetheless, Hu is very cheerful and he refuses to be bowed by his experiences. He doesn't look tough, but he has clearly learned resilience from his parents. Although he is a Beijing native, his parents were declared as "Rightists" during the Mao era in the 1950s, and then were sent to the countryside in Hunan during the Cultural Revolution for re-education. "So I'm from Beijing, but I'm not really a Beijinger. I speak Mandarin rather than Beijing dialect."
He studied in Beijing but by 1996 he had started on his path of opposing the status quo. He began doing environmental work, joining the Friends of Nature and heading into the desert to plant trees. Between 1998 and 2000 he was in Qinghai, protecting the endangered Tibetan antelope.
It is for his work with Aids victims that he is best known in China. Aids was a taboo subject there until recent years. The government's slowness to acknowledge the epidemic contributed to its spread, especially when millions of people sold blood to unsanitary clinics in the 1990s in Henan province.
"At the time the government didn't recognise the problem. Back then Aids victims were discriminated against very strongly, because the government said Aids was caused by drugs, prostitution and homosexuality. They were in denial, believed it couldn't happen. There are hundreds of thousands of victims and each one is a lonely case, left to fend for themselves. And I like doing risky things," he says.
A Buddhist since 1979, Hu's beliefs are a driving factor behind his activism.
"I don't believe in taking life. This is why I helped the antelope and why I became an Aids activist. I saw a family, a man and his wife and their child, and all of them died within two months of my seeing them. I feel life is so precious, but so easily taken away. And so worth protecting."
He has been involved in lobbying for HIV/Aids foundations and has had much success in boosting the profile of the disease and helping sufferers get acceptance in Chinese society. The Chinese government has become much more proactive on HIV/Aids issues. The health ministry recently reported that cases in China jumped by almost 30 per cent to more than 183,000 this year.
Lawyer activist Gao is not in Beijing at the moment, though his family is still in the capital. Hu believes his house arrest will end once the authorities have moved Gao and his family out of Beijing, and out of harm's way, probably next month. "When I'm free I will go to a village outside Beijing, where everyone makes their Chinese New Year petitions and makes jiaozi [meat dumplings] too. But I'm also ready that the next step for me after house arrest will be jail."