CHINA: Unrest fears prompt alert at universities

Universities in China have come under government surveillance in the wake of unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, as nervous authorities fear the 'contagion' could spread to China.

Police have been mobilised to break up large gatherings three weekends in a row, for fear that they could turn into larger scale protests similar to the 1989 student-led Tiananmen protests, which were brutally put down but have been seen as a forerunner for recent unrest in the Middle East.

Heightened security at universities was part of a government alert as a result of online calls for 'Jasmine' rallies - echoing the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia and Arab countries - in various cities, which began around 20 February and have continued for three weekends.

Most recently the protest calls named protest venues in 41 cities compared to 27 a week before.

China's official newspapers carried commentaries calling on citizens to reject online calls for the rallies, which the official Beijing Daily said had destabilised the Middle East and North Africa.

"Today, we are all Egyptian," Ai Weiwei, a Chinese dissident and artist, said on a micro-blogging website the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

"It only took 18 days for the collapse of a military regime [Egypt's] which was in power for 30 years and looked harmonious and stable. This thing [the Chinese government] that has been for 60 years may take several months."

This week over 730,000 police officers and security officials were mobilised in Beijing, according to official media, as an open letter by the organisers of so-called Jasmine rallies called on students at major universities to join protests.

The open letter sent to the universities of Peking, Tsinghua, Renmin, Fudan, Sun Yat-Sen and Xiamen last week called on students to "take a stroll in busy locations of big cities to express their discontent with social problems, including rising housing prices, inflation and the poor prospects of university graduates."

Many university graduates are struggling to find employment, with around one in four of the 2010 graduating class looking for work.

Universities in Beijing were said to have been issued with official bans forbidding students to take part or congregate at protest sites. Witnesses reported that police cars were evident outside Beijing University, which was at the vanguard of the student-led anti-government protests in 1989 that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre that June.

According to human rights groups 100 activists have been placed under house arrest and universities in Shaanxi and Jiangsu were ordered to shut their gates to prevent students from leaving campus.

On the face of it the protests appear not to have materialised. But seasoned China-watchers said the Jasmine rallies had sparked a new kind of 'low-risk' protest in China. Many 'protesters' went to public places such as shopping malls where it was impossible to distinguish protesters from regular shoppers, in order to show symbolic support.

John Burns, professor of politics and public administration at Hong Kong University, said it was a technique suited to dissent under a regime that "routinely locks people up". The protesters can simply "claim 'I was here shopping'", Burns said.

Some commentators are referring to the non-rallies as a 'ghost revolution' which has succeeded in mobilising a huge security apparatus, "that in itself has alerted the people that there may be invisible protesters in our midst," said an academic at a university in Southern China who declined to be named.

But others suggested that a similar revolution is unlikely in China. "Chinese leaders learned their lessons more than 20 years ago with the Tiananmen protests," said Wenrang Jiang, director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Unlike in the Middle East "the Chinese leadership is no longer a single dictatorship that hangs on to power forever, but a collective structure with regular serving terms," he said.

Nonetheless, the underlying dissatisfaction with the Communist Party was never resolved after the Tiananmen crackdown.

Zhang Xiangling, the mother of a student killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, told Hong Kong media she had been under surveillance since 19 February, the day before the first weekend Jasmine rallies were called for in China.

Zhang said she and 128 relatives of victims of the Tiananmen crackdown sent an open letter to the National People's Congress (NPC), the national decision-making body holding its annual meeting this week, "calling on our Beijing leadership to face up to and study the 'Jasmine revolutions' in the Middle East and North Africa seriously, as the leaders of Egypt and Libya both mentioned our Tiananmen protest 22 years ago."

The Tiananmen mothers have been sending open letters since 1995 demanding an official investigation into the 1989 crackdown which the Beijing authorities have constantly denied led to any deaths on the square.

Dissidents and petitioners who embarrass the authorities are regularly rounded up in advance of annual meetings of the NPC, which began on 6 March. That meeting, against the backdrop of the Middle East and North African unrest, was keen to mollify the masses.

Ahead of the meeting premier Wen Jiabao stressed that improving people's livelihoods would be the top priority in the government's economic plan. Wen admitted that the government "had not yet fundamentally solved a number of issues that the masses feel strongly about."

In a two-hour policy speech opening the NPC session last week he acknowledged: "Recently, prices have risen fairly quickly and inflation expectations have increased.

"This problem concerns the people's well-being, bears on overall interests, and affects social stability," Wen said.

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