I would add that cultural claims that Chinese people and hence the society are fundamentally different from people elsewhere often veer into essentialism and are at best unreliable. David Brooks's recent column about Samuel Huntington is insightful in this regard.

To be clear, the argument here is not that China is flirting with a revolutionary moment. But this does not mean that this is not an unusually important moment, and a deeply revealing one as well.

At the simplest level, it is hard to understand how a call to protest can be declared a failure if it virtually causes a nation's entire security apparatus to come out in force and to take extraordinary measures of one kind after another, as has happened in China.

Ever the great builder of walls, China responded to last week's call for protesters to gather at a McDonalds in central Beijing by erecting barriers around the fast food establishment and deploying sanitation workers to hose down the streets to shoo people away. Watching over the scene were large numbers of policemen, both uniformed and plain-clothed, who didn't hesitate to use muscle to bundle away suspected foreign correspondents, many of whom were then subjected to interrogations on camera.

In the week since, during the run up to the third successive weekend where the word "Jasmine" has been used as a call to protest in China, dozens of foreign correspondents have received phone calls or visits from state security agents who have warned them about reporting on such sensitive matters and made dark hints about visa renewals down the road should they fail to take the advice.

The extraordinary measures continued last weekend, with an even bigger deployment of police in central Beijing who cordoned off areas of the city, stopped suspicious looking foreigners (which basically meant adult, non-Asian foreigners) for questioning and to turn them away, and interrupted subways service to a part of the city where students are heavily concentrated, for fear that they might congregate or protest.

And finally, according to the Associate Press, foreign journalists were told that new rules now apply to the exercise of their profession. Special prior permission is now needed for them to conduct any newsgathering in central Beijing.

There have been any number of other special policing measures, many of them involving increasingly radical intervention by censors on the Internet, rendering it slow or difficult to access a multitude of websites, especially foreign ones, reportedly interfering with Gmail, and of course blocking access to any number of words deemed dangerous, beginning of course with Jasmine. Someone wrote me from Shanghai on Sunday to say that talking about the speed and censorship of the Internet has become as regular a feature of daily chitchat there, and presumably elsewhere in China, as the weather.