An appeal to replicate Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” in 13 cities across China over the weekend has flopped spectacularly.

There was little sign of any demonstration, just huge crowds of police, journalists and onlookers at the proposed sites in Beijing and Shanghai.

A handful of people were arrested including a man who tried to take a photo of a jasmine flower with his mobile phone in Beijing, raising suspicions that the call to demonstrate was meant to be performance art.

The anonymous appeal first appeared on an overseas Chinese activist website and was then spread by Twitter (which is banned in China but widely accessed by dissidents via proxies but not by the general population).

Human rights campaigners said the call had prompted the authorities to question or detain scores of activists before the protests.

The Guardian reports that Liu Shihu, a human rights lawyer, was beaten and dumped on the roadside to prevent him taking part in the southern province of Guangdong.

Unlike the protests that have swept the Middle East over the past weeks, the call for revolution in China originated from overseas and there was a noticeable lack of popular support coming from inside the country.

From The Financial Times blog:

“Many ….onlookers at the Sunday protest… said they had no idea what the gathering was about. The explanation of a planned ‘Jasmine revolution’ in China drew a stare of disbelief on most of the young faces.”

This salient point was largely ignored by much of the western media, who preferred to blame the strict censorship and a heavy police presence for the failure of the protests.

“Police and Internet censors easily thwarted an anonymous online appeal for people to stage simultaneous antigovernment protests,” said The Wall Street Journal without citing evidence of popular support for such a protest in China.
Jeremiah Jenne, in the Atlantic, has wiser words:

“While it can be easy to sell a message of ‘Stick with us or face the consequences’ when you have near total control over the education, information, and media environments, it is still worth noting that an awful lot of people in China, especially in Beijing, buy into this.

So long as this is the case, and so long as there aren’t any events or causes which mobilize popular discontent across class lines or geographic distance, the chances of a revolution —  of any flavour —  in China will remain quite remote.”

Indeed, the failure of the protests gave state-employed columnists the chance to pour scorn on the protest organisers. The English-language Global Times ran an opinion piece which likened them to “beggars in the streets — they never fade away, while the rest of the country moves forward”.

Whether performance art or a genuine call for revolution, China’s “Jasmine Revolution” has only caused more trouble for activists in China — Liu says the beating fractured his leg — and tightened internet censorship.