Jasmine Revolution is spooking Communists

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 South Korea's capital. But the laptop in his backpack is a tool in a would-be revolution.

The 22-year-old computer science student is part of a group behind appeals that started popping up on the Internet seven weeks ago calling on Chinese to stage peaceful protests to get the Communist Party to move toward democracy. Those calls have spooked the government into launching one of its broadest campaigns of repression in years to keep the protests from catching on as they have in the Middle East.

The Associated Press tracked down the student and some of his colleagues, giving an inside look at one group of campaigners behind the online petitions. The group is a network of 20 mostly highly educated Chinese with eight members inside China and 12 in more than half a dozen other countries. Calling itself "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.

Interviews with four members of the Initiators show similar evolutions: All are young people who 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," the soft-spoken 22-year-old who goes by the Internet alias "Forest Intelligence" said in an interview in Seoul.

The group's calls for demonstrations every Sunday in dozens of cities have attracted many onlookers and few outright protesters. Still, their impact is clear. The government has responded with more police on the streets, more Internet monitoring and the detention, disappearance or arrest of more than 200 people.

"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 who, at 27, is one of the group's older members. He recruited the others.