Arab Revolutions Provoke Caution In Beijing
img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-70771" title="BEIJING2" src="/files/wxrimport/2011-02/beijing2.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="105" /><The Wall Street Journal reports:
BEIJING—Chinese authorities detained dozens of political activists after an anonymous online call for people to start a "Jasmine Revolution" in China by protesting in 13 cities—just a day after President Hu Jintao called for tighter Internet controls to help prevent social unrest.
Only a handful of people appeared to have responded to the call to protest in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other cities at 2 p.m. Sunday, a call first posted on the U.S.-based Chinese-language news website Boxun.com and circulated mainly on Twitter, which is blocked in China.
But Chinese authorities seemed to take it seriously, deploying extra police to the planned protest sites, deleting almost all online discussion of the appeal, blocking searches for the word "Jasmine" on Twitter-like microblogs and other sites and temporarily disabling mass text-messaging services.
Ahead of the planned protests, more than 100 activists across China were taken away by police, confined to their homes or went missing, according to the Hong Kong-based group Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
The online protest appeal is likely to compound the apparent concern among Communist Party leaders that the recent uprisings against authoritarian governments in the Middle East and North Africa could inspire similar unrest in China. The lackluster popular response, however, demonstrates how much harder it would be to organize a sustained protest movement in a country with a well-funded and organized police force, and with the world's most sophisticated Internet censorship system.
At one of the designated protest sites—a McDonald's outlet in Beijing's central Wangfujing shopping district—a crowd of several hundred people gathered, along with hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes police, shortly before 2 p.m.
The crowd, however, consisted almost entirely of foreign journalists and curious shoppers—many of whom thought there was a celebrity in the area—along with a handful of young people who said they had heard about the protest appeal and came to watch.
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