Introduction
In February 2011, an anonymous online appeal — no signatures, no organizers stepping forward — called on Chinese citizens to “stroll” and “watch” at designated spots in 13 cities in response to the Middle East’s “Jasmine Revolution.” It never produced a single protest of any visible size; barely a slogan was ever shouted. But the reaction it provoked amounted to one of the harshest waves of repression in China since 1989. The arrests began before the gatherings did: within weeks, dozens of rights lawyers, writers, and activists had been criminally detained, formally arrested, or simply “disappeared” without any legal procedure at all; more than a hundred others were summoned, placed under surveillance, or confined to their homes. In the end, even the word “jasmine” itself vanished from China’s internet — and from its flower markets.
Background and Causes
In December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation set off nationwide protests; on 14 January 2011, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia for 23 years, fled the country. The revolution took its name from Tunisia’s national flower — the jasmine. Egypt followed: from 25 January, Egyptians filled the streets, and President Hosni Mubarak resigned on 11 February. News of the Arab uprisings spread around the world via the internet — including into China.
China at that moment was gripped by inflation and unaffordable housing, while corruption and judicial unfairness fed broad public resentment, and land seizures kept sparking mass incidents. At the end of 2010, the village chief Qian Yunhui died in murky circumstances at the entrance to his village in Yueqing, Zhejiang, drawing nationwide online scrutiny and suspicion — one of a series of episodes showing that discontent was plentiful; what was missing was an outlet. The demonstration effect of the Middle East arrived at just that moment.
The authorities were alert almost from the start. On 15 February 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on internet freedom criticizing governments that suppress online expression. On 19 February — the day before the first planned gathering — Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao addressed senior provincial- and ministerial-level officials at the Central Party School, stressing the need to strengthen “social management,” including the management of the “virtual society” of the internet (per reporting cited in Wikipedia’s article on the protests).
The Call and the Gatherings: A Timeline
The call appears. According to the Chinese Wikipedia article on the events, the earliest message appeared on 17 February 2011 on an anonymous Twitter account, “Mimitree” (@mimitree0). On 19 February, the U.S.-based Chinese-language website Boxun published a longer appeal signed by “the Initiators and Organizers of the Chinese Jasmine Revolution,” calling for gatherings every Sunday at 2 p.m. starting on 20 February at set locations in 13 cities: outside the McDonald’s on Wangfujing in Beijing, outside the Peace Cinema on People’s Square in Shanghai, and in Tianjin, Nanjing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Shenyang, Changchun, Changsha, and Harbin. The slogans it listed included: “We want food, we want jobs, we want housing”; “We want fairness, we want justice”; “Begin political reform, end one-party dictatorship”; “Lift the press ban, freedom of the press”; “Long live freedom, long live democracy” (per Wikipedia).
The Associated Press later interviewed one of the groups behind the call: some 20 Chinese people collaborating anonymously online, eight of them inside China and the other twelve spread across six countries (per AP reporting). Boxun’s founder, Watson Meng, told Voice of America on 25 February that Boxun had not initiated the campaign and did not know who had. From 19 February, Boxun came under a suspected China-origin distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that repeatedly took it offline (per Chinese Wikipedia).
20 February: the first gathering. That afternoon, Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping street was packed with uniformed police, plainclothes officers, journalists, and onlookers. Canada’s Globe and Mail reported that about 200 people answered the call in Beijing; no visible protest took shape, though one demonstrator was reported denouncing the government as “a tyranny that suppresses the citizens.” U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman appeared near the rendezvous point; the embassy said he had merely been passing by. Crowds also gathered on Shanghai’s People’s Square, where some people were taken away on the spot, while in most other cities police had pre-emptively occupied the sites. Notably, the crackdown had begun before the gatherings: on the evening of 16 February, Beijing rights lawyer Tang Jitian was taken from his home by police; on 19 February, lawyers Jiang Tianyong and Teng Biao, Chengdu writer Ran Yunfei, and activist Ding Mao, among others, were seized in succession; and Sichuan activist Chen Wei answered a police invitation to “tea” on the morning of 20 February and never came home.
The tactic shifts to “strolling.” After the first Sunday, the organizers published an open letter on Boxun on 22 February urging participants to stop shouting slogans and simply show up and “stroll”: “We invite every participant to stroll, watch or even just pretend to pass by. As long as you are present, the authoritarian government will be shaking with fear” (open letter of 22 February, quoted in Wikipedia). The logic was deliberate: if protesters were indistinguishable from ordinary pedestrians, the suppression itself would become the only “news.”
27 February: the second gathering. The call now extended to 23 cities. The authorities had installed corrugated metal fencing outside the Wangfujing McDonald’s — and outside the home of jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Hundreds of police, plainclothes officers, and red-armbanded volunteers were pre-positioned on the streets. No protest materialized; what materialized was a confrontation between police and the press. According to an eyewitness account in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg reporter Stephen Engle was grabbed by several security officers, pushed to the ground, dragged along by his leg, punched in the head, and beaten with a broom handle by a man dressed as a street sweeper. BBC reporter Damian Grammaticas said his crew was roughed up, his cameraman dragged into a police van, and he himself pulled by the hair; journalists from CNN, Voice of America, and other outlets were shoved, detained, or had footage deleted. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China condemned the attack on Engle. In Shanghai, the South China Morning Post reported, when police tried to arrest an elderly man, the crowd “reacted instantly and angrily, emitting a guttural roar and surging forward almost as one,” forcing the police to back off. That evening, Premier Wen Jiabao held an online chat with internet users, promising action on inflation, corruption, and housing; France 24 saw the timing as an apparent bid to defuse the protest call, while Chinese state media said the chat had been planned in advance.
6 March and after. On 2 March the organizers announced a three-stage strategy and urged people to appear on 6 March by “strolling” into fast-food restaurants and ordering a “set meal No. 3.” That Sunday fell during the annual session of the National People’s Congress; according to Beijing municipal figures, some 180,000 police and 560,000 security volunteers were on patrol in the capital (per Wikipedia). Plainclothes officers blanketed Wangfujing, Xidan, and Zhongguancun, and no obvious protest emerged. In Shanghai, more than a dozen foreign journalists were briefly detained at People’s Square (per the Associated Press). On 13 and 20 March, heavy police deployments remained at the designated sites, but the streets stayed quiet. Boxun’s temporary site had already announced on 26 February that, under enormous pressure and continuing attacks — and because the affair had brought “innocent harm” to countless activists and internet users — it would stop posting the rally notices. By late March, the “strolling” campaign had silently faded away.
The Authorities’ Response
The scale and intensity of the response vastly exceeded anything the “gatherings” themselves ever amounted to:
- Preventive arrests and “disappearances.” Unlike earlier rounds of short-term detention, this campaign made heavy use of extralegal methods: many people were taken away with no paperwork at all, held at undisclosed locations, while their families searched in vain for word of them. Human Rights Watch noted that the police domestic-security apparatus this time combined arrests on state-security charges with disappearances, beatings, and threats against family members (HRW commentary, April 2011).
- Pressure on universities. According to Hong Kong media reports, education authorities in Jiangsu and elsewhere instructed universities to keep students and teachers on campus on gathering days; some schools stepped up monitoring of campus networks, and teachers “had talks” with individual students to dissuade them from going out.
- New red lines for foreign journalists. From 25 February, Beijing police informed foreign journalists one by one that reporting at Wangfujing, Shanghai’s People’s Square, and similar locations now required prior permission — permission that, under the reporting rules carried over from the Beijing Olympics, had not previously been needed. On 3 March, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters that the journalists had broken the rules, warning, “Don’t use the law as a shield,” and adding that “some people are eager for the fray and attempt to create trouble in China” (per the Foreign Ministry’s press-conference transcript). Days later, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi denied that police had beaten any journalist, saying China was a country under the rule of law and “there is no such issue” (per Xinhua and other reports). Some journalists reported nighttime visits by police warning that if they did not “cooperate,” their visas would not be extended at year’s end (per reporting cited in Wikipedia). After 6 March, The Australian described the standoff as the biggest between the Chinese authorities and foreign media in more than two decades.
- The numbers, in multiple tallies. Counts differ by methodology, but the magnitudes agree. Amnesty International said on 23 March that since late February more than 100 activists had been detained, placed under surveillance, intimidated, or had gone missing, 24 of them facing state-security charges such as “subversion.” Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), tallying on 31 March, counted 26 people criminally detained, more than 30 forcibly disappeared, and more than 200 placed under “soft detention” at home. Human Rights Watch said on 31 March that since 16 February up to 25 lawyers, activists, and bloggers had been detained, arrested, or disappeared, with a further 100 to 200 people subjected to summonses, house arrest, and other measures. The New York Times reported on 15 April that at least 54 leading activists had been arrested or detained.
Arrests and Disappearances: Individual Cases
The disappeared lawyers. On the evening of 16 February, Beijing lawyer Tang Jitian, who had handled many rights cases, was dragged from his home by police; people close to him later told Human Rights Watch that he had been severely tortured in custody. He was released on 5 April but remained under house arrest (per the OMCT/FIDH report and Human Rights Watch). On 19 February, lawyer Jiang Tianyong was seized at his brother’s home, where he was staying, and thrown into a waiting van; police returned the next day to confiscate his laptop, and the day after to search his room and take his desktop computer. He was missing for a full two months, returning home only on 19 April (per reporting cited in Wikipedia). The same day, legal scholar Teng Biao of the Open Constitution Initiative was summoned by police and vanished; his home was searched and his computers and books confiscated. He was released on 29 April. Guangzhou lawyers Tang Jingling and Liu Shihui and Shanghai lawyer Li Tiantian were also taken and held incommunicado during this period; Human Rights Watch reported that Liu Shihui had been violently assaulted by law-enforcement agents shortly before he disappeared. Released lawyers were generally required to sign “letters of guarantee” promising not to criticize the Communist Party, not to contact overseas organizations, and to stay silent about their detention — and most did refuse to speak to the media afterward (per the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s 2011 Annual Report).
Writers and ordinary internet users punished for speech.
- Ran Yunfei, a Chengdu writer and prominent blogger, was summoned on 20 February and detained; his home was searched and his computer confiscated. On 25 March he was formally arrested for “inciting subversion of state power.” After nearly six months in custody, prosecutors never moved the case forward: he was released home between 9 and 10 August and placed under six months of residential surveillance (the Associated Press reported his return home on 10 August; the CECC records 9 August as the date he was granted bail).
- Chen Wei, a Sichuan democracy activist and 1989 student-movement veteran from Suining, was criminally detained on suspicion of “inciting subversion,” according to a police document issued on the evening of 21 February; he was formally arrested on 28 March. On 23 December, the Suining Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to nine years in prison and two years’ deprivation of political rights for opinion essays he had published on overseas websites — at that point the harshest sentence of the crackdown, in CHRD’s assessment, handed down after a trial of about two and a half hours. CHRD reported that Chen told the court he was not guilty, declaring: “Constitutional democracy will prevail; dictatorship will be defeated!”
- Ding Mao, an activist from Mianyang, Sichuan, was taken into custody on 19 February and formally arrested in late March on the same charge as Ran and Chen; he was released on 1 December and placed under six months of residential surveillance (per Reporters Without Borders).
- Zhu Yufu, a veteran Hangzhou dissident and a founder of the China Democracy Party, was detained on 5 March and formally arrested on 11 April. His trial was held on 31 January 2012, and on 10 February the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to seven years for “inciting subversion of state power.” Among the evidence cited by prosecutors was a poem he had written during the Jasmine calls and shared over Skype, titled “It’s Time” — a poem became the basis for a seven-year sentence (per Reuters and CHRD).
- Hua Chunhui, an ordinary internet user in Wuxi, Jiangsu, was detained for one reason only: he had posted messages about “jasmine” on Twitter. Police first held him on suspicion of “endangering state security,” then — without any trial — sent him to 18 months of Re-education Through Labor (per Amnesty International’s April 2011 urgent-action file). Wei Qiang in Beijing was among others sent to labor camps in the same period; and in Harbin, Liang Haiyi was criminally detained for forwarding news of the gatherings in a QQ chat group (per Chinese Wikipedia).
Ai Weiwei. The artist Ai Weiwei was the crackdown’s most internationally watched case. On 24 February he had posted on Twitter: “I didn’t care about jasmine at first, but people who are scared by jasmine sent out information about how harmful jasmine is often, which makes me realize that jasmine is what scares them the most. What a jasmine!” On 3 April, he was seized by police at Beijing Capital International Airport as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong, and was then held in secret at an undisclosed location for 81 days: no formal charge, no lawyer, and for a long time no word to his family. On 7 April the Foreign Ministry said he was under investigation for suspected “economic crimes.” His studio was raided, and several people around him — his accountant Hu Mingfeng, his driver Zhang Jinsong, and the journalist Wen Tao, among others — were also taken away for a time. On 22 June, amid sustained international protest, Ai was released on bail; Xinhua said he had confessed to tax evasion and would repay the taxes. He was then billed more than ten million yuan in back taxes and fines, his passport was confiscated, and he was barred from leaving Beijing; the passport was returned only in July 2015. Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch analyzed at the time that taking down a figure widely thought to be untouchable was calculated to signal that no one was immune — and must have been approved at the top of the leadership (per Wikipedia).
Heavy sentences in the same season. On 25 March 2011, Sichuan activist Liu Xianbin was sentenced by a Suining court to ten years for “inciting subversion”; his case had begun in 2010, but the verdict landed at the height of the crackdown and rights groups record it alongside this wave. On 26 December, Guiyang activist Chen Xi was sentenced to ten years on the same charge (per The Guardian). In January 2012, Wuhan writer Li Tie was also sentenced to ten years for subversion (per The New York Times).
Censorship: The Disappearance of a Word
After the call appeared, “jasmine” quickly became a forbidden word. According to reporting cited in Wikipedia, China Mobile and China Unicom blocked messages containing the word “jasmine” （茉莉花）; searches for “jasmine” on Sina Weibo, China’s largest microblogging platform, returned nothing, and Baidu searches for “Chinese Jasmine Revolution” came back empty; on the social network Renren, status updates containing the word triggered an error message warning users against postings with “political, sensitive … or other inappropriate content.” Searches for words such as “Egypt” and “Tunisia” were also restricted for a time. To evade the filters, internet users took to calling the gatherings lianghui — “the Two Sessions,” the simultaneous annual meetings of the legislature and the advisory body — a word the censors could not block without also blocking the official news itself.
The censorship went beyond text. In late March, Google stated that intermittent problems with Gmail in mainland China constituted “a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail” (per Google’s statement, cited in Wikipedia). And it spilled off the internet altogether: on 10 May 2011, The New York Times reported that Beijing police had banned the sale of jasmine flowers at several of the capital’s flower markets; some vendors were made to sign written assurances that no jasmine would be sold at their stalls, and wholesale jasmine prices collapsed. A Guangxi jasmine-industry company said officials had canceled that summer’s China International Jasmine Cultural Festival. A real flower had become something that could no longer be openly sold.
Official Statements
Official messaging ran throughout. On 23 February, Zhao Qizheng, spokesman for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said the idea of a “Jasmine Revolution” in China was “preposterous and unrealistic” (per Wikipedia). On 3 March, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu warned foreign journalists not to “use the law as a shield” (above); days later, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi denied any journalist had been beaten. At the March session of the National People’s Congress, its chairman Wu Bangguo proclaimed the “five no’s”: no multi-party rotation in office, no diversity of guiding ideologies, no separation of powers or bicameral system, no federalism, and no privatization — widely read as a direct rebuttal of the Middle East upheavals and of domestic calls for political reform. Premier Wen Jiabao, the same month, remarked that without political reform, the gains of economic reform might be “lost.” The leadership’s phrasing varied; the treatment of streets and dissent did not.
Impact and Aftermath
On the surface, this was a movement in which “nothing happened”: across five Sundays, no gathering ever reached any scale, and no banner was ever raised. Yet Human Rights Watch called the ensuing repression “the most severe crackdown in over a decade,” and Chinese Human Rights Defenders called it the harshest in fifteen years — in CHRD’s words at the time, “every day, someone is disappeared, taken away, detained or charged.” The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances expressed “serious concern” at the wave of enforced disappearances.
The signature technique of the crackdown — the disappearance — was then moved toward legalization. Draft amendments to the Criminal Procedure Law published in August 2011 included provisions allowing police to place suspects in state-security and similar cases under “residential surveillance” at a designated location, in certain circumstances without notifying their families. Human rights organizations criticized the draft as an attempt to give legal cover to the secret detentions already used on a large scale that spring (per analyses by Amnesty International and other groups).
Most of those released were forced into silence: guarantee letters signed, no statements, no interviews, no accounts of what happened inside. Tang Jitian, Teng Biao, Jiang Tianyong, and their fellow lawyers remained under pressure for years afterward; China’s rights-lawyer community and civil society entered a long contraction, and many rights organizations regard the 2015 “709” crackdown on lawyers as this trajectory’s continuation and escalation (covered in a separate article in this site’s Historical Events section).
None of the call’s original demands — officials disclosing their assets, a free press, an end to one-party rule — was ever answered. An anonymous post changed nothing material; what it measured was the exact depth of a regime’s fear at the prospect of its citizens merely taking a walk in the street.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “2011 Chinese pro-democracy protests” and “2011 crackdown on dissidents in China,” and the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, and Globe and Mail reporting cited therein
- Chinese Wikipedia, “中国茉莉花活动” (The Chinese Jasmine Activities)
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD): statements of 25 February and 31 March 2011 on the escalating crackdown following the “Jasmine Revolution” call; report on Chen Wei’s sentencing, 23 December 2011
- Amnesty International: press release of 23 March 2011; Urgent Action update of 11 April 2011 (UA 50/11), recording the formal arrests of Ding Mao, Ran Yunfei, and Chen Wei and Hua Chunhui’s Re-education Through Labor sentence
- U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC): “Authorities Crack Down on Rights Defenders, Lawyers, Artists, Bloggers” (updated May 2011, with case-date table); analyses of the Chen Wei sentencing (December 2011) and of the Ran Yunfei and Ding Mao cases; 2011 Annual Report
- Human Rights Watch: statement of 31 March 2011, “Arrests, Disappearances Require International Response”; commentary of 7 April 2011 on the crackdown
- OMCT (World Organisation Against Torture) and FIDH joint reporting on the cases of Tang Jitian, Jiang Tianyong, and Teng Biao (via UNHCR Refworld)
- Transcript of Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu’s regular press conference, 3 March 2011 (published on Chinese embassy/consulate websites)
- The New York Times: reporting on the Beijing jasmine-flower ban (10 May 2011), on at least 54 activists detained (15 April 2011), and on Li Tie’s sentencing (January 2012)
- Reporters Without Borders, 10 August 2011, on the releases of Ran Yunfei and Ding Mao; Committee to Protect Journalists reporting
- Cover image: Wikimedia Commons (see file page for license)