China Shuts Down Sparsely Attended Protests
The BBC reports:
The time was about 1330. Lines of Chinese police stood at the entrance to Wangfujing, Beijing's most famous shopping street.
The authorities' anxiousness was palpable.
Dozens of police vans were parked on the roadside, uniformed men with dogs patrolled up and down, street cleaning vans drove up and down spraying water to keep people away, and a sudden rash of suspiciously unnecessary street repairs meant big hoardings had been put up.
It would have been farcical if it hadn't turned so brutal.
The reason for all this nervousness was the call that had gone out over the internet for Chinese people to stage their own "Jasmine Protests", copying the wave of democratic revolutions in the Middle East and north Africa.
The police were monitoring everyone going into the pedestrian zone. But unable to distinguish the protesters, who'd been called to "stroll" peacefully and silently past McDonald's restaurant at 1400, from genuine shoppers they focussed on picking out foreign reporters and cameramen.
Targeted campaign
A similar call a week ago had brought out just a handful of protesters. Since then stepped-up internet controls have been blocking any mention of the word "jasmine".
So relatively few people in China even know the call for protests has been made.
There has also been a deliberate and targeted campaign to round up lawyers, activists, and bloggers, around a hundred people in total. Some have been detained, some disappeared, others threatened.
A few, who seem to have reposted internet messages calling for peaceful gatherings, face extremely serious subversion charges.
We were immediately singled out. Uniformed officers blocked our way a few hundred yards from McDonald's and demanded our press cards. Nervously they talked into mobile phones and handheld radios.
They stalled us, then barked at us to stop filming. Plainclothes men came and stood right in front of our camera so we couldn't take shots.
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