BEIJING--Let us be clear from the start: this is not a blog post about a would-be revolution.
It’s about the demonstration of state power in a police state.
Today was the second Sunday in a row of an unspecified number of mass gatherings anonymously called across the country to protest against the Chinese government and some of its policies.
At two p.m. local time, ordinary people were urged “to take an afternoon stroll” to show solidarity. “As long as you are present, the authoritarian government will be shaking with fear,” says the call for “Jasmine Rallies” circulating online.
In Beijing, the location was a McDonalds in the busy shopping district of Wangfujing. But just hours before the scheduled hour, rumours surfaced that the designation had been changed to a KFC a few storefronts north of the McDonalds.
This may have been due to the overnight appearance on Friday of a construction site that surrounded the original site. Wooden walls barricading some mysterious edifice took up half of the street, severely limiting traffic.
Today, we turned up in Wangfujing early and were immediately confronted with a massive police turnout. Uniformed and plainclothes officers populated the main thoroughfare every few feet. Inside the shops and malls were small groups of local community police volunteers with red armbands.
Rows of police vehicles — vans and sedans — were parked on side streets running off the main strip. At least a handful of large buses — both the tourist kind and the type used by city transport — sat next to the vehicles or on Wangfujing. We guessed they would serve as paddy wagons should things get out of hand.
It turns out the only thing that got out of hand was the security.
This was the heaviest police presence we'd seen in the capital since the 2008 Summer Olympics, and even this seemed to rival the overtly public scale of what was on display three years ago.
A Shadowy Detail
The designated KFC was on the first floor above ground, and there were large windows overlooking Wangfujing. We entered to eat lunch.
Tables alongside the window were occupied by plainclothes police, some carrying tourist camera bags, but all of them wearing some sort of earpiece — the telltale curly white wire running down their necks.
By Adrienne Mong/NBC News
Plainclothes security sit inside the KFC overlooking Wangfujing. Spot the earpiece on the man to the left.
One table began filming us as we stood nearby, eating at a counter.
The same group filming us followed us out of the restaurant and onto the street. They even entered the same café we dropped into to buy some coffee. One man, in a bright red anorak, stood out; his constant companion was a small digital video camera.
By now, fellow journalists we recognized were appearing and being checked for IDs. The police were taking no chances. They even stopped a western couple with two small children.
Pairs of uniformed police with large German shepherds on muzzles patrolled the street.
Three water trucks pulled up outside of the KFC entrance.
In the meantime, the 3G signal on my Blackberry was acting up. I could no longer receive/send emails or Tweet (using hastag #CN227 for today's date). China Mobile, a major state-owned telecoms company, kept our handsets firmly on GMS, which permitted only phone calls and text messages. China Unicom, another state-owned telecoms company, only had SOS service.
Flooding the Zone
By Adrienne Mong/NBC News
More plainclothes police with earpieces sit inside a cafe.
Two o’clock came and went.
The water trucks were joined by one more. They began driving up and down the length of south Wangfujing, spraying the road and, more significantly, clearing it of pedestrians.
No one was allowed to loiter for long. Police regularly pushed people along, sometimes politely, sometimes roughly, but always saying the same thing, “Move along, move along, don’t stop here, you’re interfering with traffic flow.”
As two o’clock got further away, however, the authorities became more aggressive.
A police tape went up on the street south of McDonald’s. The authorities checked Chinese people for IDs now, too; they appeared to be singling out young men with backpacks—anyone who looked like a student, perhaps a likely participant in the Jasmine rally?
Journalists were prevented from filming. Anyone with a camera was suspect. Professional cameras were confiscated or their owners barred from entering. A handful of journalists were roughed up.
We saw a scrum and tried to see what was happening. Stephen Engle, an American reporter with Bloomberg TV, was being shoved and pushed by the police. When he fell to the ground and shouted for help, we tried to approach. We were immediately bundled away—dozens of police turned us around and pushed us down the street. Large men, in down jackets and tracksuit pants, individually began bumping into people, like pinballs, keeping them away. (Engle was reported to be still in police custody at the time of this posting but planning to go to the hospital tonight.)
Bystanders Confused
Even the street cleaners, in their neon-colored vests, got in on the act. One of them used his broom to sweep at the feet of my colleague, cameraman David Lom, to keep him off-balance when he tried to film and to drive him away.
Ordinary Chinese were bewildered. “What’s going on? Why can’t we walk here?” they asked.
By Adrienne Mong/NBC News
Passersby take photos of the police dogs, normally an unusual sight in an ordinary shopping district like Wangfujing.
Some were more belligerent. One woman started shouting, “Why can’t I go down here? Why are you stopping me? Stop pushing.”
Others tried to work out the reasons for security by identifying the authorities. “These are ordinary police [Public Security police], not wujing (People’s Armed Police),” said one man.
But he was wrong. The wujing were there, too.
What looked like a handful of squads of PAP troops marched in formation past the water trucks outside the KFC and McDonald’s.
Around three o’clock, the authorities had stopped traffic altogether on the southern end of Wangfujing, right where it abuts with Chang’An Road—where the People’s Liberation Army drove its tanks down towards Tiananmen Square in 1989 to crush the student protests.
Crowds were building at this end, behind police tape and police.
And then suddenly they were free to go.
What is remarkable is, at the end of the day, no recognizable protest took place in Wangfujing.
By Adrienne Mong
