Liu Gang Launches Protest Against US Government and Companies

1989 Chinese student leader Liu Gang was spotted outside of the White House with a home-made protesting poster yesterday. He was calling on the US government to act on what he termed as the "unrestricted warfare" conducted by the Chinese government on American soil.

Liu Gang has been embroiled in a nasty divorce after his second marriage fell apart. He publicly accused his estranged wife as a former Chinese military officer and that the Chinese government has launched a para-military campaign against him, his now-former employer, and other Chinese dissidents and American dignitaries. Almost a year ago, he sued Chinese president Hu Jintao in a New York court with similar accusations.

Liu Gang also claims that he was the initiator of the so-called "Jasmine Revolution" in China and that it made him a target of the Chinese government.

His public accusations of his wife and his former employer have led to him losing his job and being temporarily arrested a few times. But he has vowed to defy a court-ordered gag order and continue to protest his case in public. This morning, he declared he will travel around the country with his personal protests. He did not disclose details of his plan.

AP Tells the Story of Chinese Jasmine Instigators

Ever since the so-called Chinese Jasmine Revolution stirred up in mid-February, many individuals and groups have tried to claim as its initiators. Since the initial call for action was done anonymously, it's virtually impossible to ascertain the true responsible party.

In an exclusive story, Associated Press jumped into the foray today by revealing what they called "one group of campaigners behind the online petitions," led by a young Chinese student in Seoul:

The group is a network of 20 mostly highly educated, young Chinese with eight members inside China and 12 in more than half a dozen other countries.

Calling itself "The Initiators and Organizers of the Chinese Jasmine Revolution" after a phrase used in the Tunisian uprising, the group is not the sole source of the protest calls; at least four others have sprung up.

Interviews with four members of the Initiators show similar evolutions: All are young people who grew to resent the government's autocratic rule and China's widespread inequality and injustice. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt made change look possible.

"People born in the late '80s and the '90s have basically decided that in their generation one-party rule cannot possibly outlive them, cannot possibly even continue in their lifetimes. This is for certain," the lean, soft-spoken 22-year-old who goes by the Internet alias "Forest Intelligence" said in an interview at a cafe in Seoul's trendy Samcheong-dong district.

AP explained that the group has established a significant presence in the online world of social networking, but most of its 1,000+ users seem to be living outside of China. They also list Wang Juntao as one of their advisers.

The story did not present any real evidence of the group's reach and effectiveness, however.

Crackdown in Sichuan

A wave of recent crackdowns in the Sichuan Province has caught the attention of New York Times, which reported the formal arrests of Ran Yunfei, Ding Mao, and Chen Wei. All three of them are charged with the crime of "inciting subversion."

The formal charge came at the heels of the sentencing of Liu Xianbing to 10-year in prison for "subversion."

Two of the newly charged have direct links to the 1989 student movement. Ding Mao (丁茅) was a leader of the independent student organization at his Lanzhou University (兰州大学) at the time. Chen Wei (陈卫) was the same at his Beijing Institute of Technology (北京理工大学). The third one, Ran Yunfei, is a well-known author and blogger who has been detained about a month earlier.

Over at ChinaGeeks, Charlie Custer keeps "an incomplete list" of people who have been arrested, detained, or missing since the latest crackdown started a month or so ago when the so-called "Jasmine Revolution" stirred up.

Beijing Daily Warns Against Middle East-Style "Unrest"

In a front-page article titled "Conscientiously Safeguard Social Harmony and Stability," the Beijing Daily became the first official media in China to formally address the possibility of a "Jasmine Revolution" there.

The Associated Press paraphrases the article in its report:

Such movements [in Middle East] has brought nothing but chaos and misery to their countries' citizens and are engineered by a small number of people using the Internet to organize illegal meetings, the Beijing Daily, published by the city's party committee, said in a front-page editorial.

"The vast majority of the people are strongly dissatisfied (with the protests), so the performance by the minority becomes a self-delusional ruckus," the newspaper said.

...

In its editorial, the Beijing Daily attempted to draw a sharp distinction between China and the Middle Eastern countries roiled by unrest, where disdain for long-serving autocratic rulers has frequently been fueled by high unemployment and economic woes.

In a similar news report by AFP, however, the word "turmoil" is used in its translation:

"This turmoil has brought a massive calamity to the people of these countryies," the Beijing Daily said in a commentary.

"Turmoil," or 动乱 in Chinese, became a very sensitive phrase during the 1989 student movement and was a critical point of contention between the student protesters and the government then. It has been rarely used since then.

The Beijing Daily commentary used a different phrase, 动荡, which means "unrest" or "big shake-up," for which the Associated Press has the more accurate translation.

Arab's Tiananmen and China's Jasmine

Ever since 1989, "Tiananmen" has become a catch-word depicting governments' suppressing and massacring their own people, or even the possibility of it, whenever and wherever a popular uprising occurs. The year of 2011 is no exception.

Almost as soon as people in Tunisia marched on the streets, the appearance of the word "Tiananmen" in world news skyrocketed. Fortunately, such dire predictions did not materialize there. In Egypt, tanks did roll on streets and in Tahrir Square. In most likelihood, a repeat of Tiananmen was averted only in the last minutes when soldiers disobeyed a direct order from Mubarak. Scores of protesters did perish there, but not as a result of direct military involvement.

It was a Libya the situation got much dicier. The reference to Tianamen gained a degree of formality when the dictator there, Muammar Gaddafi, made a direct link in one of his odd-ball speeches. In his immortal words, he invoked that history to justify his own stance:

People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square.

When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It's not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn't taken away.

As his people died in the hands of government troops in his "whatever it takes," the United Nation Security Council debated on how to deal with the atrocity. China, a permanent member of the council with veto power and the origin nation of the Tiananmen massacre, was put on a peculiar position. After some initial hesitation, China reluctantly joined the rest of the world to refer the Gadhafi regime to the International Criminal Court and impose sanctions to the country.

Perhaps the only location of uprising without a link to Tiananmen is at Madison, Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, the term "Jasmine Revolution," derived from the initial uprising in Tunisia, became a sensitive word in China. There has been chatters in China's twitter world that flashmob-style gatherings were called for in many cities there first on Sunday, 2/20, and then again on 2/27. Large-scale crowd failed to materialize on either occasion. But the buzz was loud enough to attract the attention of international media and, perhaps inadvertently, the US Ambassador.

Nobody has formally come out to take the credit or responsibility of the twitter activity yet, although it is increasingly clear that it had originated from the oversea Chinese dissident community instead of the younger generation in China as it was initially reported. Indeed, one of the 1989 student leaders, Liu Gang, had claimed being the originator in an Internet forum and accused others for hijacking and misleading the "revolution." Other exiled 1989 student leaders, including Wang Dan, Wuer Kaixi, and Wang Juntao, have also been active in propagating the messages in their social network circles. Wuer Kaixi joined a supporting protest by a dozen or so people in Taiwan and Wang Juntao sang the "Jasmine song," literally, at the Times Square in New York City.

So far, the ones who took this so-called "Jasmine Revolution" in China seriously are the Chinese authorities, who are busy blocking related web traffic and employing various tactics to prevent public gatherings in city centers. The police have far out-numbered the onlookers at the scenes.

But there are real and far more serious threats behind the scenes. More than a dozen human rights activists have been detained by police in recent days. Their involvement, or the lack thereof, to the phantom revolution is so far unclear. In the most serious cases, a leading blog writer, Ran Yunfei (冉云飞), and others are being charged with subversion or inciting subversion, convenient crimes for government to charge dissidents in recent years. They will be facing lengthy sentences.