Chinese govt blocks coverage of 'Jasmine Revolution' protests

China blocked phone messages and websites to stamp out any movement toward pro-democracy revolts that have toppled two leaders in West Asia and sparked bloody crackdowns in Libya and Bahrain.

Internet messages circulated over the weekend urged people to gather in 13 major cities to demand food, jobs, housing and justice in a “Jasmine Revolution”. Today, phone messages using the corresponding phrase in Chinese would not transmit on China Mobile’s network in Beijing. Sina Corp’s microblogging service, China’s most-popular, returned no related content when a search for the Chinese word for “Libya” was entered. Similar results were seen on the microblogging services of Tencent Holdings and NetEase.com.

The restrictions highlight concern among Chinese leaders that some of the conditions that sparked protests in West Asia exist in their own country. China, ruled for six decades by an authoritarian Leninist government, also grapples with a large gap between rich and poor and high unemployment among university graduates.

“China is the only major economy in Asia that really hasn’t had a political change for many, many years,” William Belchere, global chief economist at Mirae Asset Securities  said in an interview. “You are getting some catalysts for these things. It’s always been food prices or people’s living standards not keeping up.”

Protests took place yesterday in cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with foreign television coverage showing police clashing with small numbers of demonstrators and several protesters struggling as they were bundled away into custody.

National response
More than 20 cities including Tianjin, Guangzhou and Chengdu stepped up security measures and universities in Shaanxi and Jiangsu kept students from leaving campuses, the South China Morning Post reported, citing the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. In Guangzhou, at least 500 uniformed police guarded the park’s gates and metro exits yesterday.

The English-language version of the Global Times, a tabloid-style paper run by the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, compared yesterday’s protesters to “beggars in the streets — they never fade away while the rest of the country moves forward.”

Zhou Yongkang, China’s top security official, was quoted in today’s Chinese language People’s Daily as urging the government to “defuse social conflicts and disputes just as they emerge.”

Outside McDonald’s
Today, there were no signs of unusual police presence in front of the Wangfujing McDonald’s in Beijing, site of yesterday’s gathering, nor at Tiananmen Square, scene of the bloody suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in 1989. The area around Zhongnanhai, the Beijing headquarters of the Communist Party and Shanghai’s People’s Square were also quiet.

The scale of protests was tiny in a country of 1.3 billion when compared with the West Asia unrest, reflecting controls on information and the success of the Communist Party in spurring economic growth, analysts said. China’s economy has grown more than 90-fold since the start of economic reforms more than three decades ago.

“It’s unlikely the Jasmine Revolution will pose a big threat to the regime in the foreseeable future,” Willy Wo-Lap Lam, an adjunct professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in an e-mail. “The big difference is that in China, the educated/professional classes have been co-opted into the system: most of them feel they are beneficiaries of 32 years of reform.”