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One of his country's most vocal and respected democracy activists, Hu Jia lives under constant surveillance and endures periods of arbitrary detention, constant threats, beatings and harassment, which have escalated to a point where he feels his life is in danger and he fears for his family.

Hu Jia is also a human rights and environmental activist, who tackled AIDS-related issues when HIV/AIDS was still a prohibited topic in China and the number of suspected cases was treated as a state secret. He has repeatedly called for an official inquiry into the Tiananmen Square massacre and compensation for the victims' families, and has been placed under house arrest around the anniversary of the Tiananmen killings every year since 2004, when he tried to lay flowers in the square.

In 2007, via a conference call with the European 合法博彩网站's Subcommittee on Human Rights, he bravely drew attention to the fact that one million people have been persecuted by China's national security department for fighting for human rights, with many detained in prison, labour camps or mental hospitals. He called for 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, to be the year of human rights in China. As a result, Hu Jia was arrested on 27 December 2007 for inciting subversion of state power and was sentenced on 3 April 2008 to three and a half years imprisonment and denied his political rights for a year.

When he was announced as the winner of the Sakharov Prize on its 20th anniversary, Hu Jia and his parents were pressured by state security police to refuse the prize. Hu Jia bravely accepted it, calling it 'an important prize for China'. Zeng Jinyan, his then-wife and co-nominee for the prize in 2007, addressed the award ceremony, which Hu Jia could not attend, via a video recording. She declared the award a recognition of the uphill struggle of Chinese human rights defenders, a struggle for which they and their relatives pay an extremely high price.

In a letter to the President of the European 合法博彩网站 sent in July 2012, Hu Jia said he considered the prize to be a 'truly a great honour' that 'provided [him] with encouragement and greatly improved the way [he] was treated in prison'.

He was released in June 2011 and has remained in China to continue his outspoken criticism from within and to denounce the continuing crackdown on activists under President Xi Jinping. He sees this crackdown as a sign of nervousness by a regime seeking to maintain its hold on power against a growing tide of support for democracy.

As a coordinator of the 'barefoot lawyers', an informal group of legal advisers who defend human rights activists in China, Hu Jia has warned that China's counterterrorism law restricts the right to a lawyer for those accused of terrorism in a country where, 'because the government controls propaganda, if they say you are a terrorist, then you are one.' He has also raised serious concerns that the Chinese authorities' programmes of mass surveillance are leading to digital totalitarianism in China.

Hu is still kept under strict surveillance by the Chinese Government. In politically sensitive times, he is forced to take 'vacations' outside of Beijing in order to prevent him from addressing the media.