China’s Crackdown On Jasmine

In Tunisia, jasmine has been a revolutionary symbol. Chinese authorities are taking a literalist approach.

The child of a flower grower from Daxing, China, snoozes beside pots of contraband. Photo: Sim Chi Yin, The New York Times.

HFP applauds Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield of the New York Times for following up on a February story out of China: Inspired by Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” dissidents in China then began calling for their own uprising, using the tiny, fragrant white flower as their emblem too.

The Daily Mail and other outlets reported in late February that an anonymous blogger had urged Chinese citizens to take to the streets: “We welcome… laid off workers and victims of forced evictions to participate in demonstrations, shout slogans and seek freedom, democracy and political reform to end ‘one party rule.’”

Internet activists asked protestors to “stroll silently holding a jasmine flower.”

In Hong Kong, protestors bore pictures of jasmine flowers in protest outside the Chinese liaison office, February 20. Photo: Reuters.

The crackdown was quick. Channel News Asia wrote Sunday, February 20th, that some 15 “leading Chinese rights lawyers and activists have disappeared since Saturday amid a nationwide police mobilisation, according to activists, while the government appeared to censor Internet postings calling for the demonstrations.” Then and in the ensuing months that’s included intermittent blocking of the Chinese character for “jasmine” from cellphone text messages. The Times also reports, “Videos of President Hu Jintao singing ‘Mo Li Hua,’ a Qing dynasty paean to the flower, have been plucked from the Web.” And Jacobs and Ansfield also write that officials in south China have cancelled this summer’s China International Jasmine Cultural Festival “fearful of the flower’s destabilizing potency.”

As usual, though it’s flower growers and sellers who have taken it on the nose. Jasmine sales were banned in February, and as a result farmers have seen prices drop to a third and vendors have been strapped.

“Several of those who run stalls in one large plant outlet, the Sunhe Beidong flower market [in Beijing], said local police had called peddlers to a meeting and forced them to sign pledges to not carry jasmine; one vendor said she had been instructed to report to the authorities anyone even seeking to purchase jasmine and to jot down their license plate numbers.”

The White Jasmine Branch: Zhao Chang, early 12th century Jasmine was a late import to China. Image: wiki.

An immediate symbol of democratic resistance, thanks to Tunisia’s uprising, the jasmine possesses more intrinsic qualities that make it beautifully subversive: it’s small, white as a new tooth, and overpoweringly fragrant. You can’t help but meet it even before you spot it.

Could it be that only in cultures still braced by authoritarianism that symbols—floral or otherwise—maintain their capacity to arouse the defiance of subalterns and the fright of dictators?

Jack Goody’s magnificent Culture of Flowers offers other clues as to why the jasmine might exude special power in China. He writes that flowers in China were primarily gifts not to people but to gods or the dead. Thus a ‘jasmine revolution’ stakes its claim not solely on the will of the people but on their tie to greater forces— ancestral and divine. Goody also notes that unlike the native peach, chrysanthemum and lotus, jasmine was a plant imported to China. Government authoritarians and strict nationalists may have found the prospect of a jasmine revolution that much more offensive, signalling the infiltration of menacing “foreign” elements into Chinese society.

This interesting webarticle from early March (perhaps not downloadable in China) asks for the protests to continue and specifies locations where dissidents should gather; many are Western food and beverage franchises, like Starbucks, KFC and McDonalds.

Holy drumstick! We never thought we’d see the day Colonel Sanders became revolutionary.