Beijing, February 28: A call for protests on Sunday in more than 20 Chinese cities resulted in a tiny turnout but an enormous law enforcement presence that led to police clashes with foreign journalists in Beijing.
A police officer tried to stop a photographer on Sunday along Wangfujing Street in Beijing, where a protest had been called.
The appeal urged protesters to walk slowly or stop in front of landmarks in their cities’ downtowns at 2 p.m. The idea was to emulate the spirit of the so-called Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that kicked off protests throughout North Africa and the Middle East — but in a nation where a strong security force makes full-blown demonstrations almost impossible to organize.
Like with a similar appeal last week, few people responded to the call on Sunday, in part because it was carried on Internet sites like Twitter and Boxun that are banned in China. Efforts to repost the calls for protest on Chinese social networking sites were immediately blocked by censors.
There also is little evidence of a groundswell of popular anger against the government in China, which boasts three decades of strong economic growth.
Officials, however, are concerned that inflation and rising property prices could lead to unrest. In an online chat, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to hold down food prices. He also lowered the official target for economic growth this year to 7 percent from 7.5 percent, a sign that the government will focus more on quality-of-life issues than its growth-at-all-costs strategy.
But in central Beijing, few people seemed aware of any protest. Uniformed and plainclothes police officers were out in force on Wangfujing Street, a shopping district where the demonstration was scheduled to take place, but several shopkeepers attributed the police presence to the Chinese Parliament session that opens this week.
“I don’t know,” said a noodle shop owner who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the topic. “Why is there a protest? I never heard of it.”
Three men were detained in front of the Wangfujing Bookstore, witnesses said. The Beijing police did not return calls.
The police tried to turn back some foreign journalists approaching Wangfujing Street by making them register, a requirement contrary to government regulations put in place for the 2008 Olympics. Police officers also forced people to move along and not loiter in front of stores at one end of Wangfujing.
Later, the authorities used water trucks to flood the sidewalk and directed sanitation workers with long brooms to sweep the water toward the journalists. “We have to keep Beijing clean,” one worker said.
The police also assaulted at least two foreign journalists who tried to record the heavy security presence.
–Agencies