KEY POINTS:
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.
In a chair not far away from the mural sat a dummy, its head encased in a black hood and what was meant to be blood stains on the shirt.
Almost exactly the same scene and the same messages were found in room 1204 in the Nova Hotel across the city. One of the messages called for ratification of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
For the protest at Hotel G, the activists spread the word quietly and in code. We were to wait until a text message arrived giving us an address and a room number. We did not know what we were going to other than it would be a protest of the type the Chinese authorities abhor. This is a country where any journalist even wishing to visit Tiananmen Square has to apply for permission.
When word came, we headed to the hotel. On the way, we speculated about whether stories of listening devices in the back of taxis were true and just how many telephones, mobile telephones and emails were being monitored at the Olympic Main Press Centre and elsewhere.
When we arrived, things didn't feel right. For a start, the black car with the blackened window was joined by another, meaning that maybe the authorities had heard about this protest. That wasn't good but we kept moving to the hotel.
Then another bad signal. The activists had done their marketing rather too well. As we reached the lobby, other journalists emerged, crowding into the lobby. What began as a quiet infiltration had turned into a media ruck.
The hotel's guest relations manager, a European woman, moved to intercept the group, blocking the lift well before we could enter.
She insisted on knowing who we wanted to visit. She was given a name but still blocked our progress.
IN CHINA, if you visit a hotel, you must sign in and be given the official approval of the hotel, with all names passed to the Public Safety Bureau. It is illegal to enter a hotel without signing this register.
One of the group slipped away and bolted up the stairs to the room. Inside, he found the group of five others watching a video showing, among other things, a Tibetan supporter urging action during the games. The architect of the protest appeared to be a French man.
Downstairs, the burly driver of the black car decided to come in.
He may or may not have been a spook but he made his way through the crowd, ostensibly to the toilet, looking keenly at faces. He might just have been a driver, waiting for his boss from a meeting at the hotel. But he used a radio and looked official. Hotel staff blocked the lifts and the stairs, preventing any further access.
The journalist who slipped up the stairs (whose identity will also be protected because he lives in China) told the Herald on Sunday what happened next. After the video had been going for a while, the hotel manager banged on the door until those inside finally relented.
"For God's sake," the manager said. "Please get out of this room and leave. Stop taking photos.
"Please think of all the people who work in this hotel. You will cause us all a lot of problems. We could lose our jobs because of this - you know there is PSB in the hotel."
So it was over. A tame protest and finish, perhaps, but there was a sense of threat in the air and some desperation from the hotel staff.
And it amply illustrates the stakes facing those who do not agree with Government policy and who voice that dissent - and those who are caught in the crossfire.
As we left, we heard the news. Four protesters had also taken advantage of the focus on Tiananmen Square and unfurled a giant banner down the side of the Bird's Nest, the central feature of the Beijing Olympics.
All of them - including two Britons - were detained.
Just in case we forgot we were not standing in a free society, the Hotel G activists promised to send photographs supporting their protests.
The email was blocked.
The next day Hotel G was completely closed down.
