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The Associated Press
China’s troublemakers bond over ‘drinking tea’

By Cara Anna, Associated Press Writer | March 10, 2010

BEIJING –Like the United States, China is having
its own tea party movement, but this one has a
very different agenda.

Police have long tried to shush and isolate
potential activists, usually starting with a
low-key warning, perhaps over a meal or a cup of
tea. Now, the country’s troublemakers are openly
blogging and tweeting their stories about
“drinking tea” with the cops, allowing the
targeted citizens to bond and diluting the
intimidation they feel.

The movement is an embarrassment for officials,
who are suspicious of anything that looks like an
organized challenge to their authority. And it
can’t help that “drinking tea” stories seem to be
spreading among ordinary Chinese, including ones
who signed a recent online call for political
reform.

The country’s top political event of the year,
the National People’s Congress, has given the
stories another bump. More than 200 people say
they’ve been invited by police to “drink tea”
since just Friday, when the congress began, said
independent political blogger Ran Yunfei.

“That’s according to what I gathered from the
Internet,” he said Wednesday. “And that doesn’t
include the people who didn’t identify
themselves.” There was no way to independently
verify the number.

Twitter is blocked in China, but that hasn’t
stopped people from getting around Internet
controls and posting sometimes hour-by-hour
diaries of their police encounters on the social
networking Web site. Some give advice to nervous
newcomers facing their first invitation to
“chat.” Some, tongue in cheek, suggest
restaurants for the usually uncomfortable meal.

Writer Yu Jie tweeted last week about going to
the movies with police, who drove him there and
followed him inside. “They bought tickets, but
maybe they get reimbursed,” he wrote.

Yu spoke by phone Wednesday while shopping at a
branch of the French supermarket Carrefour, with
two officers following him a few steps away.

“More and more people have conquered their fears
and written about what happened to them,” Yu said.

Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet
Project at the University of California-Berkeley,
is excited about the potential of the “drinking
tea” movement. He used to translate people’s
stories, but now there are too many.

“The way to control dissidents’ activities is by
creating fear and isolation. Other people don’t
dare to become your friends. You feel
threatened,” he said. “But the Internet countered
that effort by connecting those people. They have
a sense of community, which makes them bolder and
stronger.”

A new Web site, the “Drinking Tea Chronicles,”
appeared in China on Feb. 27, a few days before
the political meetings began in Beijing. It
encourages people to share their own stories by
e-mailing them to the site.

The “Drinking Tea Chronicles” and a similar blog,
“Invited to Drink Tea Chronicles,” remained
unblocked Wednesday.

The “Tea Party” movement in the United States, an
entirely different phenomenon, emerged as
anti-tax protests partly in response to the
government’s stimulus package of early 2009. It
takes its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773
when activists in the then-British colony of
Massachusetts dumped shipments of tea into Boston
Harbor to protest a new tea tax.

In China, the “drinking tea” stories started
appearing in 2008 but took off in recent months
as authorities cracked down on the signers of
Charter 08, a daring call for political reform in
China that was signed by hundreds of people,
including some of the country’s top
intellectuals. Co-author Liu Xiaobo was sentenced
to 11 years in prison.

“Many of the people who signed are students,
lawyers, businesspeople,” Xiao said. For some,
signing the petition brought their first visit
from police. Their stories, some startled, some
angry, have appeared on “drinking tea” sites and
other blogs.

Xiao has a name for the newcomers, who had no
political background until now: “They’re what I
call the conversions,” he said.

But some Chinese don’t need to sign petitions to get attention.

On Wednesday, a factory worker in the southern
city of Shenzhen put out an alert on his Twitter
feed, saying police wanted a meeting. He worried
it would mess up his first day in a new job.

In a phone call, Fang Zhixiong told The
Associated Press that he must have drawn
attention by discussing human rights and
constitutional issues online.

“I tweeted so if I miss work tomorrow, people
will know I ended up in the police station,” he
said.

Within a couple hours of his alert, Fang was
thanking worried readers — with the proper lingo.

“I haven’t had tea yet,” he tweeted. “Thank you for your concern.”
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company