Chinese human rights activists had hoped jailed dissident Hu Jia would win the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. Having a Nobel prize winner would've brought a storm of international attention to their cause. They felt they'd lost the chance of having a worldwide platform when the Nobel committee instead on Oct. 10 announced the awardee to be Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari – a highly worthy but much less controversial candidate - for his three decades spent resolving conflicts like those in Aceh and Kosovo.

Hou "Maggie" Wenzhou is a friend of Hu Jia's who herself spent 18 days in detention this summer for her role in an alternative pre-Olympics "Human  Rights Torch Relay". She says she was arrested by five plainclothes police in a downtown Beijing café, hooded and shoved into a van shortly after the campaign distributed 1,000 posters in southern townships notorious for police brutality against farmers protesting land seizures.

I talked with Hou as we sat in the corner at a children's party juggling slices of sticky cake on paper plates. She told me of her disappointment at the Nobel committee's decision. Hou has known Hu Jia for four years since they combined forces to oppose the trial and imprisonment of blind activist Chen Guangcheng, from Shandong province.

She describes Hu as a "rather moderate" personality, a self-effacing type who gathered support and a reputation among China's democracy advocates because he has "a good heart" but is "more courageous" than most. "Hu Jia is a man of conscience, a man of courage, a man of very pure soul…it's not that those qualities are impossible for another person but it's very difficult to express [them] in this land", she said. Hu Jia had expanded his campaigning  from HIV/AIDS sufferers to farmers' land rights. The thirty-five year old is serving a three-and-a-half year jail sentence for subversion after he, among other things, testified online to a European parliamentary hearing.

To Hou, the Nobel Prize is a potential platform to promote China's need for human rights, rather than a booster for any one person. The winner gets "a voice to speak out worldwide".  She would be "equally happy if [jailed lawyer] Gao Zhisheng were to win it or [exile] Wei Jinsheng, or the Tiananmen mothers". The point is to "make the human rights issue more widely known and the Chinese government more embarrassed". Some would say the Chinese government has proved resistant to embarrassment -- as shown by its determination to ride out criticism of its treatment of Tibetan protesters earlier this year -- but she criticizes Western governments as simply over-willing to accept China's official promises of improvements.

Hou says that, during her detention, her interrogators eventually acknowledged that they'd nabbed her to prevent her disrupting China's image during the run-up to the Olympics. "They said, 'Look we're having a major symphony going on, and you come to play the Chinese erhu [a type of traditional fiddle]. It doesn't sound right'". Conditions inside Qincheng prison on the northern outskirts of Beijing were tolerable. She was held in a clean, new, low-rise building, more like a hotel room – her words - than a prison cell but lights were kept on 24-hours a day, and she was videoed constantly.

Hou was startled to find her investigators were "very senior", which she ascribes to official nervousness that she speaks English and studied at Harvard. As well as insisting her own May 30 detention was unlawful, she gave them pointers on correct police procedure, and repeatedly insisted that protests and multiple voices are normal. She was eventually released on June 16 after being ordered to write a "self-criticism". She denied any wrongdoing, told the police they had a genuine role to play ("That was the first paragraph", she says) but should respect others just as she respected them. As a final piece of advice she suggested China's rulers follow the example of new emperors seeking public support throughout history and release political prisoners.

Hou returned home to find her apartment stripped bare. It's not the first time Hou has been detained but it's the longest; the previous maximum was12 hours. She's also had some 100 days of house arrest in the last five years. This seasoned campaigner doesn't see any sign of China loosening up. On the contrary, she believes the wave of so-called "color revolutions" in ex-Soviet satellites since 2003 that have ousted corrupt governments of ex-Communists-in-new-clothing gave China's leaders a bad fright, and things here have been getting tighter ever since. She believes the West should pay more attention to things other than economic growth. That wish may be hard to realize, however, as the world reels under the impact of the global financial crisis.