Tianjin, China: A Chinese human rights activist was convicted of subverting state power and jailed for seven and a half years on Wednesday, official media reported, the latest step in a sweeping crackdown on dissent.

Activist Hu Shigen was the second person to be put on trial as a result of last year’s so-called ‘709 crackdown’ — named after July 9 — when more than 200 people were detained, including lawyers who took on civil rights cases considered sensitive by China’s ruling Communist party.

Hu pleaded guilty at the Second Intermediate People’s Court in the northern city of Tianjin and said he would not appeal, the official Xinhua news agency reported, which described him as the leader of an underground church.

The trial took place under tight security, with scores of police and plainclothes personnel — identifiable by small gold star pins — stationed every few metres around the court.

Traffic was blocked off on the courtside of the street about 300 metres to either side of the entrance.

Police and plainclothes men swarmed the grounds of a nearby temple and a woman claiming to be a tour guide heckled journalists, incessantly offering free trips around the city to try to lure them from the area.

Xinhua said that 48 politicians, legal scholars, lawyers and ‘civilian representatives from all walks of life’ were present in the courtroom, alongside journalists from a dozen mainland Chinese media outlets, and five from elsewhere.

Family members of those detained, particularly their wives, have complained of being constantly surveilled and denied access to the court proceedings.

About a dozen lawyers and activists from the ‘709 crackdown’ still remain under arrest on state subversion charges.

Activist Zhai Yanmin was found guilty of the same crime by the court Tuesday, for acts including waving banners and shouting slogans.

He was sentenced to a three-year suspended jail term — considered relatively lenient by the standards of Chinese dissident trials— after having ‘admitted’ to prosecutors’ accusations in court.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has overseen a tightening of controls on civil society since assuming power in 2012, closing avenues for legal activism, which emerged in recent years.

Beijing law firm Fengrui, which has defended victims of sexual abuse, members of banned religious groups and dissident scholars, was at the centre of the crackdown.

Its director, Zhou Shifeng, is scheduled to stand trial on subversion charges this week.

Another prominent Fengrui attorney, Wang Yu, who was detained over a year ago, has been released on bail, a Hong Kong TV channel said Monday as it showed her praising her jailers.