from Firedoglake by Bill Egnor: If you are wondering why you’ve not really heard much about the call for a “Jasmine Revolution” style protests in the Peoples Republic of China, well there is a reason for that. The Chinese authorities are not waiting around for the protests to grow and become something like Tiananmen Square or Tahrir Square in Egypt.As I posted about before they have been taking strong steps to crack down on pro-democracy activists for a couple of weeks. They have been preventing text messages from being sent to an entire list and have blocked all websites with key words like Jasmine Revolution.
This combined with flooding the urban areas where the protests were proposed with security forces and actually placing pro-democracy advocate under house arrest and even
disappearing more than one attorney for these groups apparently is not enough for the Communist Government in China.
In a move that shows just how worried the “workers paradise” is about its workers getting together to insist on a real voice in the governance of their nation, the Chinese government is now putting restrictions on foreign reporters inside China.
NPR is reporting this morning that the Chinese government is saying that you must have pre-approval to talk to any one in Beijing in advance. Think about that for a second; this means that if you wanted to do a “man on the street” interview about anything even say the weather, you would be in violation.
Already foreign journalists are claiming that they are having their e-mails hacked and that plain clothes police are watching them movements and their apartments. This is the kind of things that the state security apparatus use against home grown militants.
It is pretty clear that the government in China is doing all it can to keep its people from an uprsing as has been seen in the Arab world. Sadly it seems they have learned the lesson of not letting things get started. They are also learning the lesson that any kind of international reporting means, in these days of the internet, that the story will get out, no matter how hard the technological curbs come down.