The gatherings outside Southern Weekend’s office have been relatively small: a few hundred people on Monday, January 7th, and at most about a hundred on Tuesday. But the rhetoric of the speakers who took turns to address the crowd appears to have grown bolder. Several called for freedom of the press and freedom of speech—as well as free elections—to shouts of approval from those who had gathered around on the pavement in front of the building. Remarkably, around 20 police deployed at the scene made no effort to stop the speakers or remove slogans expressing similar sentiments, held aloft by a few of the participants. One large banner held up by two men said simply: Free China. At one point someone was heard to shout: “Down with the Communist Party. The Communist Party must step down!”

RARELY since the heady days of the Tiananmen Square unrest of 1989 have people in China gathered so openly, and so free of police interference, in support of wide-ranging political freedoms as they have in the past two days in the southern city of Guangzhou. The pretext for the gatherings has been the watering-down of a feisty New Year’s message that a local newspaper, Southern Weekend, was preparing to run in its latest edition. It would have urged the Communist Party to uphold the Chinese constitution and the freedoms it purportedly guarantees. Chinese journalists have accused censors of modifying the message to make it more like praise of the party. Some have called on the propaganda chief of Guangdong province, of which Guangzhou is the capital, to step down.

The police appeared unruffled. Some in the crowd said they had heard of a couple of activists being detained or prevented from joining the gatherings. But compared with the authorities’ rapid and stern response to a few attempted gatherings early in 2011 in support of the Arab uprisings, the relatively hands-off approach over the past couple of days has been striking. In the early evening, the police moved the crowd away from the building, citing a need to keep the pavement clear during the rush-hour. No one appeared to resist them, and most of the participants dispersed. Some said there would likely be more gatherings in the days ahead. This seems likely. News of the “Southern Weekend incident” has been circulating widely on the internet in China, despite the authorities’ efforts to curb online discussion of it. Many users of social media have expressed support for the journalists’ campaign against interference by the censors.

Some, however, have been denouncing the newspaper. Among the crowd outside the Southern Weekend offices on Tuesday was a small group of people who held up pictures of Mao Zedong and placards denouncing the newspaper as traitorous. When other people occasionally stepped forward to lay flowers at the entrance, in a gesture of support for the newspaper, the Maoists yelled “traitors” at them. Southern Weekend has long been a bête noire of China’s extreme leftists, who regard the newspaper as a pro-Western mouthpiece for “bourgeois liberalisation”. Fierce debates erupted between small groups of the newspaper’s supporters and the Maoists. A couple of scuffles broke out, but they were broken up by others in the crowd and by the police. Some people chanted “50 cents, 50 cents (五毛, 五毛)” and waved banknotes of that denomination at the Maoists: a reference to the widespread belief in China that the party employs people who it pays 50 cents (ie, half a yuan) in Chinese currency ($0.08) for each internet posting in favour of the party line.

Some of the participants expressed surprise at how relaxed the gatherings have been. It is possible that the authorities have yet to decide how handle them, or that they are divided over how to do so. Some officials might be reluctant to respond harshly, given that Xi Jinping chose Guangdong for his first trip outside the capital, after his appointment as party chief in November. The official media have made clear that the aim of Mr Xi’s tour in early December was to highlight his commitment to reform; Guangdong having been a pioneer of market-oriented changes in the 1980s. Few, however, expect the authorities to tolerate the kind of dissent expressed so openly in Guangzhou this week for very long.