You wonder what Huang Jingao will be thinking about every day as he wakes up in the prision cell in which he’ll be spending the rest of his life. I wonder if he wishes he’d never spoken out against corruption in China.

A local Communist Party official in southern China who rose to fame last year by denouncing official corruption in a letter on the Internet was sentenced to life in prison Thursday, the culmination of a year-long campaign by party authorities to silence and discredit him.

State media did not report the conviction of Huang Jingao, 53, the whistleblower in Fujian province who captivated the country last year with stories of his attempts to root out corruption in party ranks. But two sources involved in the case confirmed the life sentence handed down by the Nanping Intermediate People’s Court in the provincial capital, Fuzhou.

Huang, who said he wore a bullet-proof vest to protect himself from the subjects of his investigations, was put on trial in September for allegedly accepting about $715,000 in bribes between 1993 and 2004. His supporters say embarrassed party leaders trumped up the charges after he went public with complaints that senior government officials were blocking his efforts to fight corruption.

Huang was serving as party chief of Fujian’s Lianjiang county, located 300 miles south of Shanghai, when he caused a national sensation on Aug. 11, 2004, with an open letter in which he accused colleagues of confiscating land from peasants and selling it at below-market prices to real estate developers in exchange for bribes.

The lengthy missive, featured on the Web site of the People’s Daily, the party’s flagship newspaper, triggered an outpouring of support on the Internet from residents across China, where crooked land deals are common and rampant corruption is a source of deep public anger. Newspapers across the country picked up Huang’s story, and tens of thousands of readers posted messages supporting him on popular Web forums.

In his letter and in interviews with state media, Huang presented himself as an honest party official from the countryside who was just trying to do the right thing. He wrote that he had expected party superiors to support him, but instead “ran into all kinds of obstructions, as if a large, invisible net was trying to cover up this corruption case.”

Most memorably, he described rewriting his will and wearing a bullet-proof vest after receiving death threats.

China’s top leaders, including President Hu Jintao, have repeatedly sought to crack down on corruption, declaring it a threat to the party’s survival. But corruption is so deeply rooted in the political system that the leadership has been reluctant to grant investigators full independence. As a result, influential officials routinely shut down probes that could implicate them.

A few days after Huang posted his letter, the party’s propaganda department ordered all media to stop reporting the story, removed the letter from the Internet and wiped the Web clean of messages supporting his cause. Meanwhile, authorities in Fujian published a rebuttal accusing Huang of violating party discipline and committing a grave political mistake.

“The direct result of his behavior was that it would be used by hostile Western forces, hostile Taiwan forces, democratic movement elements and others, thus leading to social and political instability,” the statement said.

Police placed Huang under a form of house arrest a few months later, and state newspapers began publishing detailed stories portraying him as a corrupt and degenerate official with four mistresses whom he kept in different luxury apartments. The newspapers said he wrote the open letter because his crimes were under investigation and he wanted to blame them on others.

Well, I suppose it could be true that Huang is a corrupt and lustful criminal. But if it were, I can’t imagine why they’d have been so secretive about his trial and sentencing (read the rest of the article for the details). And the timing of his arrest sure raises some questions. Remember, these are the fellows who don’t give a second thought to sentencing a journalist to ten years for revealing the contents of speech a few days before it’s about to be delivered. So they obviously have no qualms about locking a whistleblower up for life if he embarrasses them.