In a country where dissidents are often detained, a single episode of intimidation may seem depressingly routine. But not every country is preparing to host the Summer Olympics, and not every activist has won a prestigious international award. Alexandra Li in Beijing explains what the imprisonment of Chen Guangcheng, and the recent harassment experienced by his wife Yuan Weijing, have to do with the 2008 Games.

At eleven o'clock last Thursday night, Yuan Weijing received an ominous phone call. The caller identified herself as a member of the foreign affairs office from Yuan's home village near Linyi city in Shandong province. "Since last year, your passport has been declared invalid, the reason being that you've been implicated in a criminal offense," said the caller, who went on to advise Yuan not to try to travel overseas the next day.

What branch of government works that late into the night, anyway? Still, Yuan never doubted the "authenticity" of the phone call. Just the day before, she had heard from her brother-in-law that Shandong police were pressuring him to try to dissuade Yuan from leaving the country as planned.

The warning phone call was just the latest in a string of threats, intimidation tactics and general harassment that Yuan and her husband Chen Guangcheng have endured together. Since last year Chen -- a blind, self-taught lawyer-activist in Shandong -- has been in jail, serving a four-year prison term for "disrupting traffic and damaging property." His wife and supporters claim his jailing is punishment for his daring expose of injustice in the Shandong countryside: Chen had brought to international attention the plight of rural Shandong women who'd been coerced to undergo unwanted late-term abortions and forced sterilization under a ruthless population control campaign.

Recently the Manila-based Ramon Magsaysay Foundation decided to honor him with an award for "his irrespressible passion for justice in leading ordinary Chinese citizens to assert their legitimate rights under the law." Yuan had planned to travel to Manila to collect the award in her husband's stead. As she put it in her blog, "I will bring this prize and special honor back for my beloved Guangcheng...for my relatives and friends, and also for my home country." She believed the award should be a source of pride, not shame, for China.

But Chinese authorities were hardly pleased by Chen's selection for the prestigious Magsaysay award, and whether they would allow Yuan to travel to the Philippines was always in doubt.

Plainclothes security personnel had followed Yuan in July when she left her Shandong home and traveled to the Beijing residence of Hu jia, another human-rights activist. He is also the target of police surveillance, as Yuan has been ever since her husband's imprisonment. In an e-mail sent at three A.M. on the day of Yuan's scheduled departure, Hu predicted a mere 1 percent chance that Yuan would be able to travel without obstruction, "If indeed she could reach faraway Philippines, it would be nothing short of a miracle." His e-mail concluded: "Today is testimony to the human rights situation in pre-Olympic Beijing."

Yuan was detained at the airport. Her journey aborted, Yuan's plight is emblematic of the long-running struggle pitting China's authoritarian government, intent on reining in dissent, against a small but increasingly assertive human-rights movement intent on projecting its cause to the world at large. Yuan has been forced to return to her home village, her ultimate fate uncertain.

But there's one question that seems to defy common sense. Chinese authorities had decided in advance to prevent Yuan's journey and had invalidated her passport.  Why did Chinese police and plainclothes security personnel still find it necessary to obstruct, intimidate and harass foreign journalists as they followed her departure from Hu's apartment for the airport? The interference took place in apparent contravention of China's new media rules for foreign reporters, and simply reinforces a perception of the government as hamfisted and repressive. One year before the Olympics, China's image-building strategy apparently still needs some work.