China again cracks down on planned protests across country
BEIJING — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Sunday held an online forum in which he promised to focus on making the lives of ordinary people in China more comfortable and secure. Just a few hours later, Chinese police unleashed a show of force in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities to clamp down on public gatherings after a second week of overseas Internet-based calls for protests across the country. The combination of Wen's comments about government efforts to raise living standards, accompanied by a display of China's police state tactics aimed at squelching dissent, neatly laid out in one day's time the Chinese Communist Party's approach to avoiding the kind of unrest seen across the Arab world.