The Middle East turmoil continues to have its echo across the Muslim world and China. Like in Libya, in China also authorities have responded with heavy handed action to deal with the unrest. Police action has never succeeded in suppressing people’s voice. In fact, it always has had an unintended effect. The organizers of the ‘Jasmine’ rallies in China appear to subscribe to this view. And hence their statement (on Twitter) “We believe these deeds (arrests of innocent people and obstructions) cannot stop the development of the Chinese Jasmine Revolution.”

The protest organizers asked ordinary citizens to "take a stroll" on Sunday, Feb 27 in busy areas of city centres to express their displeasure at the country’s lack of political reform.  The call for the stroll was posted on Boxun, a website that is banned in China.

Expectedly, the Chinese government has taken the threat extremely seriously though there was little response to the week-end call, the second in a row to make ‘the authoritarian government to shake with fear’.  The first call was limited to 13 cities.  The second call targetted 27 cities.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the Wangfujing pedestrianised shopping street in Beijing was occupied by squads of policemen with dogs, plain-clothes officers, and members of the People’s Armed Police, a division of the army. The local branch of McDonald’s, the meeting point designated by the organizers of the protest, was shut down, with customers briefly locked inside.

The Chinese authorities have found new weapons like shrill whistles and street cleaning trucks to check gathering of people. From eyewitness accounts it is however clear that policemen outnumbered protestors by a big margin.

For instance, there were about 200 people, who were both onlookers and quite sympathizers, near Shanghai’s People’s Square. Yet, the uniformed police blew whistles non-stop and shouted at people to keep moving.

In Beijing, trucks normally used to water the streets drove repeatedly up the busy commercial shopping district spraying water and keeping crowds pressed to the edges. Some of the streets were also closed with blue construction site barriers’, and journalists were warned not to conduct interviews ‘without prior permission’.

At least two foreign journalists were picked up and driven away in Beijing; and in Shanghai the treatment was reserved for four foreign journalists. A number of human rights activists have been charged with ‘inciting subversion’, according to Human Rights in China, a Non Government Organisation.

One reason why the authorities in Beijing are unwilling to take any chances with the Jasmine Revolution in the works is the grim reality of frustration building up across the Chinese society over inflation and rising property prices. High growth rates (GDP was 7.5 per cent in the five year period ending with 2010), though impressive, are no answer to the bread and butter issues at the gross roots level.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabo has himself acknowledged the flip-side of the growth story when he remarked on a Feb 27 on-line chat that ‘Rapid inflation affects people’s livelihoods and may affect social stability’.  He did not mention the turmoil in Middle East but said ‘I know the impact that prices can cause a country and am deeply aware of its extreme importance’.

During the online chat, Wen Jiabao pledged to hold down food prices but he knows there is no magic wand that can check prices which are as much related to global economic scenario as to supply-demand mismatch and high levels of corruption at home. He promised to punish corruption, and address China’s growing wealth gap by ensuring the benefits of expansion were more evenly distributed.

Mere pledge is not enough. The Chinese leadership must demonstrate that they can meet the people’s rising expectations. And it is no mean challenge in the absence of political reform as remarked by Willy Wo-lap Lam, an adjunct history professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong in a Beijing datelined despatch recently.