Hotel's last orders

Inside Hotel G in Beijing. Photo / Supplied

Beijing's Hotel G has just become Hotel Gone - closed down by Chinese security, maybe for the period of the Games, maybe indefinitely.

Its crime: a room was used for a Free Tibet protest.

The abrupt closure shows how some people and businesses in China live on a knife edge even today, and also demonstrates how ingenious and stealthy dissidents have to be to avoid being "disappeared".

The new hotel, near the Workers' Stadium, is painted a garish purple - a funky newcomer to the popular area around the stadium. Staff knew nothing about the protesters gathering in a room on the sixth floor. They were innocent bystanders who had desperately tried to stop journalists from accessing the room.

That didn't matter. The hotel has been closed, the guests shifted elsewhere. Chinese justice has spoken.

The hotel and its staff were caught up in a new form of protest, a necessity in Olympics-mad Beijing where those openly protesting risk deportation, detention or re-education in a labour camp. So they protest in hotel rooms, in secret.

THERE WERE six journalists in the hotel room. The protest was a muted thing, a Free Tibet video was played. But the hotel manager banged on the door desperately.

Outside, on the street, a black car with blackened windows waited, its buzz-cut, spook-like driver waitingand watching.

This is still a police state and everyone at the hotel could feel the weight of the Chinese authorities pressing against them.

The protesters, from a Free Tibet movement, made their move because it was the day the Olympic torch entered one of its final legs, taking it past the contentious Tiananmen Square. With the authorities' attention riveted on the torch and the square, the protesters felt it was safer.

The activists checked in, set up their protest and secretly informed the media of the time, place and room number, just like an earlier protest that had taken place in room 417 at the Traders Hotel in Beijing.

Journalists responding to a coded message from the activists entered the hotel, took the lift and found a room key taped in a strategic place.

They entered the room and saw a big mural which had been hung on the hotel wall - a parody of the Beijing Olympic symbols and the slogan One World, One Dream.

The mural read "Our Dream, Our Nightmare".

There were names plastered all over the mural - religious dissenters, journalists jailed because of their work, Tibetan supporters.