Mick Hartley

The BBC's Beijing correspondent Damian Grammaticas is chronicling the increasingly fraught response of Chinese authorities to any outbreaks of dissent inspired by events in the Middle East:

Human rights groups say a broad crackdown is under way and at least 100 people have been picked up or warned by the authorities. Some of those taken by the security services have vanished without a trace. Human rights organisations say such detentions are illegal under Chinese law.

The authorities have also moved to limit the relatively free reporting they have allowed in China since the 2008 Olympics. They have banned foreign journalists from filming in several public places in the capital, Beijing, including the city's most famous shopping street, Wangfujing.

Several reporters, including our BBC team, faced violence from Chinese state security officers when we tried to film on the street last weekend.

A reporter from Bloomberg News was attacked, dragged into a building, punched and kicked in an assault that lasted over 10 minutes. Other reporters have been warned that if they try to film this weekend they may be expelled from the country.

The video, including Grammaticas being manhandled by security goons, is worth a watch.

And from his latest report:

It wasn't even 6am this morning and Chinese police were knocking at the doors of foreign correspondents based in Beijing, demanding to see press credentials.

The moves are part of what appears to be a concerted campaign launched in recent days to monitor and intimidate foreign reporters in China.

Fears about the revolutions in the Arab world spreading here seem to have induced a state of paranoia in the internal security services.

For the past three weekends huge numbers of police and plainclothes security personnel have flooded sites in major cities where anonymous calls on the internet have asked people to stage silent "strolling" protests.

What's new is the way the police have turned on foreign journalists.

The New York Times is reporting the same story in Shanghai:

Western journalists have lately been tolerated in China, if grudgingly, but the spread of revolution in the Middle East has prompted the authorities here to adopt a more familiar tack: suddenly, foreign reporters are being tracked and detained in the same manner — though hardly as roughly — as political dissidents.

On Sunday, about a dozen European and Japanese journalists in Shanghai were herded into an underground bunkerlike room and kept for two hours after they sought to monitor the response to calls on an anonymous Internet site for Chinese citizens to conduct a “strolling” protest against the government outside the Peace Cinema, near People’s Square in Shanghai.

And here (via), for a feel of what it's like now for a foreign visitor in Beijing, is an amusing account by an American grad student of an ill-fated urban stroll this Sunday.