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Mar 1, 2011
Another anonymous call for a fresh round of "jasmine" rallies in Beijing and other key cities on Sunday has been widely circulated on the internet despite a show of force by police to thwart them.
The message purportedly from organisers of pro-democracy protests which had kept authorities busy over the past two weeks first appeared on Facebook, which was blocked on the mainland along with other social networking sites such as Twitter, yesterday.
The call for the rallies, inspired by the "jasmine revolutions" sweeping across the Arab world came as Beijing markedly increased security as the annual gathering of the National People's Congress prepares to open on Saturday.
Although no organised protests were reported, tens of hundreds of police broke up large crowds at city centres in Beijing and Shanghai for a second Sunday and detained more than a dozen people, mostly overseas journalists, with many reportedly manhandled.
The European Union delegation to China and the US Embassy in Beijing issued statements separately yesterday, protesting against Beijing's "harassment and detention" of foreign reporters.
The mysterious posting on a special Facebook page under the user name of "China's jasmine revolution" urged people to show up at the designated meeting places in Beijing's Wangfujing shopping street and near People's Square in Shanghai at 2pm on Sunday.
People could either gather near fast-food restaurants, take a stroll, or eat at the restaurants, said the online message.
"The code of action [for March 6] is the set meal No3 at the McDonald's and the KFC," it said.
"We only need one slogan for our jasmine revolution and that is ... Terminate one-party rule."
The posting was also carried on Twitter and other social networking sites yesterday.
In an e-mail reply to queries by the South China Morning Post, one of the purported organisers said more than 80 people in Hong Kong helped put up the Facebook page.
"One of us who went to Guangzhou to show support for the jasmine rallies in Guangzhou disappeared shortly after he managed to pass the word that he may not be able to get back to Hong Kong," the e-mail said.
But they refused to discuss the calls to rally this Sunday.
The calls for pro-democracy rallies first appeared on Twitter and Boxun, a US-based Chinese website that was subsequently attacked and paralysed. Organisers had to set up sites on other platforms such as Facebook and Google Blog.
Another anonymous posting on Blogspot, also blocked on the mainland, called for rallies in 35 mainland cities on Sunday, but it said the location of the rally in the capital would be changed to Xidan, another busy shopping district.
Bloomberg News said yesterday one of its journalists was repeatedly punched and kicked by at least five men in plainclothes in Wangfujing street and detained for several hours.
He was later taken to a police station by uniformed personnel and released.
The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China said it was appalled by the attack on the video journalist who was "trying to do his job".
"The FCCC, on behalf of its members, calls on the Chinese government to ensure the physical safety of all reporters and their staff while carrying out assignments in China," the group said in a statement.
The repeated calls for pro-democracy rallies apparently irritated Beijing, which reacted with a clampdown rarely seen in years on activists, with dozens of dissidents and rights lawyers being detained in the past two weeks.
Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a network of domestic and overseas human rights activists and groups, said activist Zheng Chuangtian was detained on Saturday for "inciting the subversion of state power" by police in Jieyang, Guangdong.
According to a number of Twitter users, two Beijing-based activists, Liu Dejun and Wei Qiang , and a Twitter user called Linglingfa, also disappeared over the weekend. They were allegedly taken away by police for questioning.
Mainland officials yesterday defended the crackdown at a briefing held by the State Council Information Office.
When a BBC correspondent directed a question at deputy cultural minister Ouyang Jian about why Beijing censored key words containing the word jasmine, senior officials were clearly embarrassed.
The question was initially turned down on the grounds it was not related to the theme of the briefing, which was supposedly on cultural reform.
But Guo Weimin, an official from the information office, added that the question was confusing and insisted Beijing had always regulated the internet in accordance with the law. Copyright (c) 2011. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.