There have been many theories advanced about the true nature of China's 'Jasmine Revolution', the great political non-event of the year here so far (well, apart from the National People's Congress, of course).
These seem to be the main ones:
1) It was a ruse by Chinese dissidents to provoke the police and government into a heavy-handed overreaction that would engender greater public opposition.
2) It was a ruse by Chinese police and government to flush dissidents out into the open.
3) It was a ruse by unknown mischief-makers - Chinese or foreign? - to make either or both of the above groups look foolish.
4) It was a conspiracy by the CIA (or some other 'foreign power') to try to embarrass or destabilize the Chinese government.
5) It was a conspiracy by 'the Western media' to make China look bad.
[Ahem - most of the Western media has no such agenda (and the Chinese government manages to make itself look plenty bad enough without any help from anyone!). However, it does suffer under an imperative to fill pages, and many Western journalists - Americans especially - were rather over-eager in jumping all over this trifling 'story'.]
6) It was a ruse by McDonald's to generate free advertising.
7) It was a ruse by KFC - or some other fast-food competitor - to get the Wangfujing McDonald's shut down, or to drastically reduce its custom.
8) It was a malicious fiction propagated by China-bashers - especially cynical old bloggers like Froog here - to try to make it appear (which is obviously not the case) that not everyone in China is happy and carefree under the rule of the Communist Party.
9) It was a hoax, plain and simple - an 'innocent' prank which has had some very unfortunate consequences.
10) It was a genuine attempt - but a woefully misconceived and half-hearted one - to create a unified focus for the numerous disparate voices of discontent here.
Take your pick. I rather suspect it's a confused mélange of a number of these. The one thing that is clear is that the very nervous Chinese Communist Party fairly crapped its pants at the suggestion that something like the Tunisian or Egyptian uprisings might start to emerge here, and has used the flimsy - perhaps entirely fictitious - 'Jasmine' Twittering movement as a pretext for the biggest crackdown on political dissent since 1989. [Supplementary theory: Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang had his budget enormously expanded during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and the PRC 60th Anniversary celebrations in 2008 and 2009, and has resisted any reduction of his new empire since. With such vast financial and manpower resources now at his disposal, he has to find ways of keeping busy. I fear this is almost certainly a major factor. Erratum: I read an article just recently in the Western press which mentioned Zhou Yongkang as being still the head of Public Security, but in fact he was bumped upstairs to the State Council quite some time ago, with Meng Jianzhu apparently taking over the Public Security portfolio from him at the end of 2007. So, it's probably Meng rather than Zhou that we have to thank for all the increased goonery in recent years.]
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