China moves to squelch protests pre-emptively; 'Jasmine Revolution'; Police mobilize to keep things quiet, despite calls for unrest.(News)

Byline: Tom Lasseter; McClatchy Newspapers

BEIJING -- Chinese officials moved Sunday to prevent demonstrations and curb dissent before protests even began. After Internet messages calling for demonstrations in 13 cities surfaced Saturday, apparently from Chinese-language sites based overseas, there were reports of activists being preemptively arrested.

Online messages spread Saturday using the phrase "Jasmine Revolution," a reference to the unrest in Tunisia that ousted the president there and inspired uprisings across the Arab world. Users on Chinese messaging sites, and those able to access Twitter through special software, posted notes saying that university students were warned to stay away from trouble.

Very few Chinese responded, and in only a couple of cities, but China's authoritarian regime still mobilized large teams of police to ensure that all remained quiet.

The response by Chinese officials was a reminder of the government's low tolerance for any hint of political discord. The country's combination of surveillance, sophisticated management of information, and a willingness to deploy large numbers of security forces has allowed it, so far, to cut off even the most remote of challenges to the Chinese Communist Party.

In Beijing, a crowd showed up in front of a McDonald's at the large Wangfujing shopping district downtown. But most of those appeared to be journalists, plainclothes police or curious shoppers wondering why there were so many cameras.

When Sunday came, the protests fizzled into almost nothing. The overwhelming majority of Chinese residents probably had no idea they'd even been called for -- the websites used to advertise the protests are either blocked or heavily censored in China.

After a few minutes, uniformed Beijing police began to file in, photographing the crowd and asking people to move along. A man walked up the stairs of the McDonald's carrying a handful of white flowers -- apparently a nod to the Jasmine theme -- and was grabbed by a plainclothes security officer and pushed to the side. The incident happened so quickly that many in the crowd didn't see what had happened.

Reporters and other onlookers, holding cameras aloft, ran after the man and the plainclothes security contingent shoving him down a side street.

The Associated Press reported Sunday that beyond the crowd in Beijing and a smaller one in Shanghai, other Chinese cities were quiet.

In the previous two days, state media had signaled that the government is looking to further exert its considerable capacity to maintain order.

On Friday, an architect of the country's Internet monitoring software told a state newspaper that the program, already regarded as among the most stringent in the world, should be strengthened.

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