A number of bloggers worldwide have been calling on Chinese citizens to display discontent for local corruption by going to crowded public areas and walking around on Sunday afternoons. Chinese authorities were quick to react, blocking all of these sites – and very few people in China got around to hearing about them. Since people still take walks in public places on Sunday afternoons, though, some authorities are convinced that the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ is still happening.

Most of these bloggers are anonymous and outside of China – so what we’re seeing is the violent, repressive tendencies employed in China being turned against entirely innocent tourists and journalists, which has the effect of sowing actual discontent.

Says ‘Global Guerrillas‘:

…young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, are all now potential ‘protesters’. Now, because of the number of competing and overlapping security agencies, there is a lot of pressure on the local commanders to make some arrests and to show some success, but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. So some young tourists get beaten up and taken away, and some journalists get smacked around.

…

Keywords get picked up by the censors, and all web and SMS traffic using them gets shut down or blocked – Jasmine itself is of course popular in Chinese culture and widely used in branding, but sites using ‘Jasmine’ in their copy, however innocuous, are blocked – with real-world social, political and economic consequences.’

So that’s pretty cool.

[Source: BBC]

[Image via  The Australian]