On Dec. 20 – in his last media interview before being detained–Chinese human rights campaigner Hu Jia never dreamed he'd be a frontrunner to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He told Newsweek that, if not for the  August 2008 Olympics, " I might be behind bars." A few days later, he was. Now Hu, an environmental and HIV/AIDS activist, has been named by Stein Tonnesson of the Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute as a frontrunner to win the prestigious award.  The institute's website stated that the time "may be ripe now to award the prize to a Chinese human rights activist just after the 2008 Olympic Games." (No Chinese has won the Nobel Peace Prize, though the exiled Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama did in 1989, a few months after the June 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in and near Tiananmen Square.)

Hu Jia isn’t widely known in China, thanks to strict censorship of sensitive political issues such as human rights violations. Still, the Nobel Foundation has been known to pick dark-horse candidates in the past to make an ideological or symbolic point (see Al Gore). In the symbolism department,  2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so a dissident winner makes sense. Meanwhile the committee has been considering Chinese awardees for the Peace Prize for years. But in past years, such a move might have derailedBeijing’s ties to the West in the delicate run-up to the August 2008 Olympics.

Now the Games are a thing of the past. And Hu , along with wife Zeng Jingyan (an outspoken blogger in her own right who remains under strict house arrest, caring for their infant daughter) are being named more and more as possible Peace Prize winners. They're more famous abroad than at home. Though he has campaigned for a wide range of issues, from the endangered Tibetan antelope to freedom of speech, Hu and Zeng were perhaps most effective at disseminating news of human rights abuses suffered by other dissidents, such as the imprisoned blind activist Chen Guangcheng.

Hu  was detained Dec. 27;  in April he was sentenced to three and a half years for "inciting subversion of state power."  In a Nov. 27, 2008 webcam address to European parliamentarians he had made comments critical of Beijing, and later became an icon for foreign activists pushing Beijing to fulfill its pre-Olympic promises of greater civil freedoms.

The five-person Nobel Peace Prize committee will risk antagonizing Beijing, however, if it chooses Hu. Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao has warned that the prize "should be given to the right person", specifically indicating that Hu was not an appropriate choice. The winner will be announced in Oct. 10 inOslo.