SEOUL, South Korea | Strolling past hip cafes, the young Chinese man in a white sports jacket and faded jeans looks like any other university student in the South Korean capital. But the laptop in his black backpack is a tool in a would-be revolution in China.
The 22-year-old computer science student is part of a group behind appeals that started popping up anonymously on the Internet seven weeks ago calling on Chinese citizens to stage peaceful protests to get the ruling Communist Party moving toward democracy.
Those calls have spooked the Chinese government into one of its broadest campaigns of repression in years to keep the protests from catching on, as they have in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Associated Press tracked down the student and some of his colleagues, giving an exclusive first look at one group of campaigners behind the online petitions, where they are based and how they use technology to operate behind the anonymity of the Internet.
Their group, they said, 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 themselves “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.
“The Initiators” group appears well-organized, with members who recruit, manage social networking sites and gather feedback.
Interviews with four members show similar evolutions: They 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” told the AP in an interview Sunday at a cafe in Seoul’s trendy Samcheong-dong district.
While the calls for demonstrations every Sunday in dozens of cities have attracted many onlookers and few outright protesters, their impact is clear. The government has responded with more police on the streets, more intrusive Internet monitoring and the detention, disappearance or arrest of more than 200 people.
Artist and government critic Ai Weiwei seems to be the latest, taken into custody over the weekend. The group said none of those detained has been involved with their protest calls.
Members of the group requested anonymity out of concern that they or their families might be targeted for retribution by the government, which maintains an extensive network of informants among student groups overseas. Most members know each other only by Internet nicknames.
They also are concerned that, with more than half of their members outside China, their movement might be seen as a foreign-backed, anti-China plot rather than a response to real domestic problems.
“The revolution was started purely because of the failure of domestic affairs, not because of overseas forces,” said “Hua Ge,” a Columbia University graduate in classics who lives in New York and, at 27 years old, is one of the group’s older members. He recruited the others.
The first online calls for a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” - a Twitter post on Feb. 17 and a longer appeal on the U.S.-based Chinese news site Boxun.com on Feb. 19 - remain anonymous. Soon after they appeared, Hua Ge said that he and a man in China, whom he refused to identify, started the website Molihuaxingdong.blogspot.com.
“Molihuaxingdong” is Chinese for “Jasmine Movement,” and it has evolved to include a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and Google groups for every Chinese province or territory. Many of the sites are blocked in China but remain effective because so many Chinese know how to elude government blocks, Hua Ge said.
“People need to have some change in their thinking,” said the native of the central Chinese city of Wuhan. “They don’t really understand what rights they have or what kind of political future they can choose.”
Their main Google group has more than 1,200 online users, though how many are inside China is not known. An online survey posted in February received 300 responses, mostly from people in China, members said, and the group gets 50 to 100 emails daily from participants in the country.
Outside China, members are in France, Australia, Canada, Korea and Japan, among other countries.
“Forest Intelligence” oversees the recruitment of volunteers and maintains the website. “Xiaomo,” a 24-year-old college student in Paris, collates comments from surveys. Boston-based student “Pamela Wang,” 18, translates news articles into Chinese and is one of eight administrators of the group’s Facebook page.
The eight members in China include an expert in online search engines, a former government employee who writes articles and someone who works on the website’s layout, Hua Ge said. He refused to provide their contact information or reveal details about them out of concerns for their safety.
Hua Ge said the group also has consulted with Wang Juntao, a prominent dissident sentenced to 13 years in prison for advising students during the 1989 pro-democracy protests centered on Tiananmen Square. Freed on medical parole in 1993, Mr. Wang now lives in New York and confirmed his assistance.
Collectively, the group’s postings are often clever with a touch of sarcasm. People are urged to “stroll” and “smile” rather than protest.
“We are making a new history of revolution by a unique way: We use the sound of laughter, singing and salutations instead of the sound of guns, cannons and warplanes!” a notice dated March 1 says.
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