Beijing, China (CNN) -- If organizers planned big protests in China to echo those in the Mideast and North Africa, they failed. On Saturday microbloggers passed around tweets calling for protests at 2 pm (0600 GMT) Sunday in a dozen major Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. But no specific place was cited until several hours beforehand. In Beijing, the place was supposed to be in Wangfujing, a typically busy shopping street less than a kilometer from Tiananmen Square. Wangfujing may have been a perfect place to trigger a mass action. The four-lane street is a designated pedestrian street, with thousands of people walking there at any given business hour; no cars and buses are allowed. For decades it has been a favorite shopping district, especially for out-of-town Chinese and foreign tourists. (Locals prefer to shop elsewhere.) At around 2:15 pm, according to CNN's Tomas Etzler, who saw the scene, a large presence of police -- uniformed and in plain cl! othes -- mingled with a gaggle of foreign journalists and scores of people carrying digital cameras. Soon they gathered a group of onlookers from the usual traffic of shoppers and tourists. Around this time, a young man started arguing with the police. It is not clear whether the event was related to the planned protest or "performance art." Most of the crowd dispersed after an hour. Security officials exercised restraint in handling the scene, Etzler said. Around Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai, the ...
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