CHINESE artist Ai Weiwei was detained after an obscene satirical work he drew enraged Communist Party leaders and handed a gift to security hardliners conducting the toughest crackdown on dissent in more than a decade.

International calls for Ai's release have been ignored and there was no official explanation for his detention by police at Beijing airport last week. But rights activists and journalists in Hong Kong say one of Ai's visual critiques of the party crossed a censorship line.

It shows the artist naked except for a toy horse concealing his genitals. The caption has a double meaning in Chinese, so millions of internet users have seen the six characters interpreted as: "F . . . k your mother, the party central committee."

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In one of the few comments on his case, a party-controlled newspaper said: "The law will not be bent for mavericks. Ai Weiwei always likes walking on the edge of the law and doing things others dare not."

Ai, 53, has won global attention by combining a talent to outrage with civil rights campaigns. His friends fear his fame and the obscene nature of his latest work may have made him a target for the crackdown.

His disappearance has put the spotlight on a campaign of repression that started after news of the Arab revolts spread on the internet in China.

Party leaders are "yielding to the demands of a security apparatus that has been radically empowered since the staging of the 2008 Olympic Games", according to Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong.

The security services have grown due to the Games, an uprising in Tibet and clashes between Muslims and Han Chinese in the western province of Xinjiang. Alarm bells rang when the Arab uprisings led a tiny group of internet-savvy Chinese, mostly based abroad, to call for peaceful revolution in their own country.

Their demands were an end to corruption, inflation and heavy-handed police, and their tactics were as inoffensive as possible. People were asked to "stroll" or "smile" at certain places and times. Only a handful dared try it.

At a politburo meeting in February, the chief of China's security services, Zhou Yongkang, and his colleagues decided to stamp on any sign of dissent, launching a wave of state repression.

The Sunday Times