20110228 China clamps down on gatherings

China clamps down on gatherings

LEGAL REVISIONISM:Beijing police struck a Bloomberg News reporter and took away foreign news crews, saying they needed special passes to report from a shopping area

AP and Reuters, SHANGHAI and BEIJING
　

A man is arrested by police in Shanghai yesterday.
Photo: Reuters

Large numbers of police — and new tactics like shrill whistles and street cleaning trucks — squelched overt protests in China for a second Sunday in a row after more calls for peaceful gatherings modeled on recent democratic movements in the Middle East.

Near Shanghai’s People’s Square, uniformed police blew whistles nonstop and shouted at people to keep moving, though about 200 people — a combination of onlookers and quiet sympathizers who formed a larger crowd than the week before — braved the shrill noise. In Beijing, trucks normally used to water the streets drove repeatedly up the busy commercial shopping district spraying water and keeping crowds pressed to the edges.

Foreign journalists met with tighter police controls. In Shanghai, authorities called foreign reporters yesterday, indirectly warning them to stay away from the protest sites, while police in Beijing followed some reporters and blocked those with cameras from entering the Wangfujing shopping street where protests were called.

Plainclothes police struck a Bloomberg News television reporter, who was then taken away for questioning.

Police also detained several Chinese, at least two in Beijing and four in Shanghai, putting them into vans and driving them away, though it was not clear if they had tried to protest.

While it isn’t clear how many people — if any at all — came to protest, the outsized response compared with the previous week showed how the mysterious calls for protest have left the authoritarian government on edge. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, where popular frustrations with economic malaise added fuel to popular protests to oust autocratic leaders, China has a booming economy and rising living standards.

Still, the leadership is battling inflation and worries that democratic movements could take root if unchallenged.

“Rapid inflation affects people’s livelihoods and may affect social stability,” Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said in an online chat yesterday.

While he did not mention the Middle East, he later added: “I know the impact that prices can cause a country and am deeply aware of its extreme importance.”

Online posts of unknown origin that first circulated on an overseas Chinese news Web site 10 days ago have called for Chinese to gather peacefully at sites every Sunday in a show of people power meant to promote fairness and democracy. A renewed call last week expanded the target cities to 27, from 13.

People reached by phone at businesses in the cities of Tianjin, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shenyang and Harbin said no demonstrations occurred.

Beyond the several Web postings, the calls lack a clear leader or organization and a well-defined agenda — ingredients experts say are crucial to the success of protest movements. China’s extensive Internet filtering and monitoring mean that most Chinese are unaware of the appeals, effectively limiting the audience.

Police have questioned, placed under house arrest and detained more than 100 people, according to rights groups. At least five have been detained on subversion or national security charges, in some cases for passing on information about the protest calls.

Police seemed to outnumber pedestrians at Wangfujing. Groups of men with earpieces crowded the seats near the window of a KFC outlet, scanning the street outside.

After blocking entrances to Wangfujing, police took away foreign news photographers, camera crews and reporters from The Associated Press, BBC, Voice of America, German state broadcasters ARD and ZDF, and others. They were taken to an office where they were told special permission was needed to report from Wangfujing, while some were roughed up, including one from Taiwan whose hand was injured, witnesses said. In doing so, the government appeared to be extending a ban on reporting at Tiananmen Square and reinterpreting more relaxed rules put in place ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

A US news videographer was also kicked and beaten repeatedly in the face with brooms and taken police custody, witnesses said.