Trying to Stir Up a Popular Protest in China, From a Bedroom in Manhattan

Two months after calls shot across the Web for a Tunisian- and Egyptian-style “Jasmine Revolution” in China, he is among the few online dissidents still trying to promote a popular protest movement inside the country. The effort has failed to provoke any major street demonstrations, but it has led to a fierce crackdown by the authorities.

Yet despite the widespread arrests of activists, including the well-known artist Ai Weiwei, many of those who began the grass-roots push for change remain active. They guard their anonymity closely, especially inside China, where they communicate using Gmail and Skype and broadcast messages to supporters beyond the country’s so-called Great Firewall of censorship.

“Our group is expanding,” said the uptown blogger, who studied the classics and graduated from Columbia University. He asked to be called Gaius Gracchus, in honor of the ancient Roman reformer, but also uses the pseudonym Hua Ge, or “Flower Brother,” online.

He spoke confidently of the power of his group of 25 young Internet-savvy activists inside and outside of China — in Paris, Seoul, Hong Kong, Australia and Taiwan — to influence China’s top leaders. With a partner in China, he was among the first to publish the times and places for protesters to gather, and he remains one of the strongest voices calling for a revolution modeled on those in the Middle East, online activists said.

“The Jasmine Revolution is like a flag,” he said. “It’s out there to be taken up by whoever wants it.”

That is the hope of the dissidents, and it appears to be a concern of the Chinese authorities. For both, the thousands of isolated protests each year over an array of issues — including environmental grievances, land seizures and corruption — have the potential to become a national movement.

“The government seems to fear how easy it is to make the small protests meaningful,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director.

But that online bravado has not succeeded in rallying disparate interest groups under a single banner for political change. In two recent large-scale protests — the truck drivers who protested rising prices by blocking a dockyard in Shanghai, and the Nanjing residents who delayed the destruction of the city’s iconic French plane trees — the organizers neither sought to connect their efforts to a Jasmine movement nor displayed any indication that they were even aware of it.

Some activists question the value of such efforts, saying that the calls for widespread protests have accomplished little except to provoke the government into arresting dozens of activists since February.

“It’s an admirable attempt at free expression, but we have not seen any sudden change come of it,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a leading human rights lawyer and advocate of democratic reform in China. “Instead, we’ve mainly seen the Chinese Communist Party frighten itself over it. So it’s hard to see the significance of it in the short term.”

The very first call for a Jasmine movement was broadcast from a Twitter account using the name mimisecret0, which was quickly overwhelmed by suspect messages and subsequently shut down, dissidents overseas said. The call was taken up by Boxun, a Chinese-language site run out of North Carolina, before that site too suffered a massive cyberattack in late February. Those attacks continue to cripple the site, said its editor, who is known by the pseudonyms Wei Shi or Watson Meng.

After the Boxun site was attacked, the New York blogger who calls himself Gaius Gracchus connected with activists in China to publish molihuaxingdong.blogspot.com, or Jasmine Movement, a simple blog on Google’s blogger platform, to keep the momentum going online. His role was first reported by The Associated Press.

The blog has registered more than 600,000 visitors, more than half of them from within China, and his group’s e-mail list includes more than 3,000 names.

Sitting at a spare black desk in his girlfriend’s Morningside Heights apartment, where he lives, Gracchus said that his group protects itself against malicious viruses by using Linux-based operating systems and by opening e-mail attachments using iPads, both of which are less susceptible to them. To secure his communications, he employs a Google application that sends a unique code, which changes every minute, to his mobile phone so he can log into his e-mail.

Such commercially available security precautions are not the stuff of cloak-and-dagger cyberwarfare, and Gracchus readily admits putting his faith in Google. “If Google falls, we would worry about our safety, but we believe that Google has better engineers than the Chinese government,” he said.

Despite his work, the revolution remains notional. No protesters have gathered in Chinese streets under the banner of the Jasmine movement since late February. Only the police heed the calls for protest each Sunday, blanketing areas in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in an attempt to snuff out coordinated gatherings.

Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Seoul.