Ji's lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan said his client had hoped to attract police so he could be detained and discuss his beating in 2005 by city security guards in the southern city of Dongguan.
Ji had denied exploding the bomb deliberately, claiming it went off accidently as he was shifting it from one hand to the other.
Ji, 33, from the eastern city of Heze, had been petitioning Chinese authorities for years after the 2005 attack, which left him paralyzed from the waist down and more than $16,000 in debt, his elder brother Ji Zhongji said.
Response to the verdict online was generally positive, although some questioned whether the government was sincere in investigating Ji's earlier beating. Legal commentator Xu Xin wrote in his verified account on the Twitter-like Weibo that Ji's sentence was relatively light.
"Well, that's that. At least in prison, his life will have some sort of order," Xu wrote.
