Journalist Assaulted in China

27/02/2011
David Young

A Bloomberg News journalist was assaulted yesterday in Beijing while covering the deployment of police in response to online calls for protests in the Chinese capital.
At least five men in plain clothes, who appeared to be security personnel, punched and kicked the reporter at Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping street at 2:45 p.m. local time yesterday. They also took the video camera he was carrying and detained him in a roadside store.
Uniformed police arrived after the attack and escorted the journalist to a nearby station where he filed a report of the attack before seeking treatment for his injuries at a local hospital. Police returned the video camera while the reporter was at the station, saying a passerby had found it.
Hundreds of police deployed in Beijing and Shanghai yesterday at the site of planned demonstrations called to protest corruption and misrule. In Beijing, few protesters were apparent amid the police presence. In Shanghai, at least seven people were bundled into police vans near Shanghai’s People’s Square
An open letter on the U.S.-based website Boxun.com called for people to gather in at least 27 sites around the country from Tibet to Manchuria for “jasmine” rallies, named after the uprising last month in Tunisia. “Come out and take a stroll at two o’clock on Sundays to look around,” the letter said.
In Beijing, on the corner of Jinyu Hutong and Wangfujing Street, police officers asked for passports of people who appeared foreign. Journalists were asked to show their press cards and their information was taken down in a notebook and they were reminded about the rules on interviews.
Controlling Unrest
On the corner of Jinyu Hutong and Wangfujing Streets, police officers yesterday asked for passports of people who appeared foreign. Journalists were asked to show their press cards and their information was taken down in a notebook and they were reminded about the rules on interviews.
Zhao Qizheng, who heads the foreign affairs committee of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, said the idea that there would be a Jasmine Revolution in China was “absurd,” Xinhua reported on Feb. 24.
The government’s reaction reflects its decades-long effort to keep unrest in check through a combination of economic growth, social reforms and political repression, said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong.
“One of the key aspects of the Chinese system is that it does not try to suppress social demands as much as to respond to them before they turn into political ones,” Bequelin said. “Everyday politics is about how to handle social demands -- which ones to accept, which ones to channel, which ones to suppress, which ones can be ignored.”