BEIJING -- Let us be clear from the start: this is not a blog post about a would-be revolution.

It’s about the demonstration of state power in a police state.

Today was the second Sunday in a row of an unspecified number of mass gatherings anonymously called across the country to protest against the Chinese government and some of its policies.

At 2 p.m. local time, ordinary people were urged “to take an afternoon stroll” to show solidarity. “As long as you are present, the authoritarian government will be shaking with fear,” says the call for “Jasmine Rallies” circulating online.

In Beijing, the location was a McDonald's in the busy shopping district of Wangfujing. But just hours before the scheduled hour, rumours surfaced that the designation had been changed to a KFC a few storefronts north of the McDonald's.

This may have been due to the overnight appearance on Friday of a construction site that surrounded the original site. Wooden walls barricading some mysterious edifice took up half of the street, severely limiting traffic.

By Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Water cannon truck parks itself outside the KFC before the rally was due to begin at 2 p.m. local.

Today, we turned up in Wangfujing early and were immediately confronted with a massive police turnout.  Uniformed and plainclothes officers populated the main thoroughfare every few feet.  Inside the shops and malls were small groups of local community police volunteers with red armbands.

Rows of police vehicles — vans and sedans — were parked on side streets running off the main strip.  At least a handful of large buses — both the tourist kind and the type used by city transport — sat next to the vehicles or on Wangfujing.  We guessed they would serve as paddy wagons should things get out of hand.

It turns out the only thing that got out of hand was the security. 

This was the heaviest police presence we'd seen in the capital since the 2008 Summer Olympics, and even this seemed to rival the overtly public scale of what was on display three years ago. 

A shadowy detail
The designated KFC was on the first floor above ground, and there were large windows overlooking Wangfujing. We entered to eat lunch.

Tables alongside the window were occupied by plainclothes police, some carrying tourist camera bags, but all of them wearing some sort of earpiece — the telltale curly white wire running down their necks.

By Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Plainclothes security sit inside the KFC overlooking Wangfujing. Spot the earpiece on the man to the left.

One table began filming us as we stood nearby, eating at a counter.

The same group filming us followed us out of the restaurant and onto the street. They even entered the same café we dropped into to buy some coffee. One man, in a bright red anorak, stood out; his constant companion was a small digital video camera.

By now, fellow journalists we recognized were appearing and being checked for IDs. The police were taking no chances. They even stopped a western couple with two small children.

Pairs of uniformed police with large German shepherds on muzzles patrolled the street.

Three water trucks pulled up outside of the KFC entrance.

In the meantime, the 3G signal on my Blackberry was acting up. I could no longer receive/send emails or tweet (using hashtag #CN227 for today's date). China Mobile, a major state-owned telecoms company, kept our handsets firmly on GMS, which permitted only phone calls and text messages. China Unicom, another state-owned telecoms company, only had SOS service.

Flooding the zone

By Adrienne Mong/NBC News

More plainclothes police with earpieces sit inside a cafe.

Two o’clock came and went. 

The water trucks were joined by one more.  They began driving up and down the length of south Wangfujing, spraying the road and, more significantly, clearing it of pedestrians.

No one was allowed to loiter for long.  Police regularly pushed people along, sometimes politely, sometimes roughly, but always saying the same thing, “Move along, move along, don’t stop here, you’re interfering with traffic flow.”

As two o’clock got further away, however, the authorities became more aggressive.

A police tape went up on the street south of McDonald’s.  The authorities checked Chinese people for IDs now, too; they appeared to be singling out young men with backpacks—anyone who looked like a student, perhaps a likely participant in the Jasmine rally?

Journalists were prevented from filming. Anyone with a camera was suspect. Professional cameras were confiscated or their owners barred from entering. A handful of journalists were roughed up.

We saw a scrum and tried to see what was happening. Stephen Engle, an American reporter with Bloomberg TV, was being shoved and pushed by the police. When he fell to the ground and shouted for help, we tried to approach. We were immediately bundled away — dozens of police turned us around and pushed us down the street. Large men, in down jackets and tracksuit pants, individually began bumping into people, like pinballs, keeping them away. (Engle was reported to be still in police custody at the time of this posting but planning to go to the hospital tonight.) 

Bystanders confused
Even the street cleaners, in their neon-colored vests, got in on the act. One of them used his broom to sweep at the feet of my colleague, cameraman David Lom, to keep him off-balance when he tried to film and to drive him away.

Ordinary Chinese were bewildered. “What’s going on? Why can’t we walk here?” they asked.

By Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Passersby take photos of the police dogs, normally an unusual sight in an ordinary shopping district like Wangfujing.

Some were more belligerent. One woman started shouting, “Why can’t I go down here? Why are you stopping me? Stop pushing.”

Others tried to work out the reasons for security by identifying the authorities. “These are ordinary police [Public Security police], not wujing (People’s Armed Police),” said one man. 

But he was wrong. The wujing were there, too.

What looked like a handful of squads of PAP troops marched in formation past the water trucks outside the KFC and McDonald’s.

Around three o’clock, the authorities had stopped traffic altogether on the southern end of Wangfujing, right where it abuts with Chang’An Road — where the People’s Liberation Army drove its tanks down toward Tiananmen Square in 1989 to crush the student protests.

Crowds were building at this end, behind police tape and police.

And then suddenly they were free to go.

What is remarkable is, at the end of the day, no recognizable protest took place in Wangfujing.

Click here for details on the security crackdown elsewhere in China.

CARLOS BARRIA / Reuters

Hu Yi Xin, left, embraces her daughter Rong Xi as she arrives from Egypt at the Pudon International airport in Shanghai on Monday.

BEIJING - For nearly a week now, as much of the world remains riveted by the events unfolding in Egypt, China is making assiduous efforts to appear uninterested.

At least judging from what’s being reported and what’s being discussed here.

The political turmoil in Cairo has received barely a headline in the People’s Daily, the main Communist Party newspaper, or much coverage by Xinhua, the state-run news agency. And a quick thumb through issues of the China Daily since last Tuesday show the protests only made the front page a couple of times, and photographs from the streets of the Egyptian capital were conspicuously rare.

What has been written is sanitized and the focus is largely on lawlessness. “[W]e hope Egypt could restore social stability and normal order at an early date,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Sunday. 

The coverage also avoids details of the underlying political factors or the calls for democracy, with the demonstrations characterized generally as “anti-government” or “anti-American.”

Information online hasn’t been any more comprehensive. Over the weekend, searches for the word “Egypt” was discovered to have been banned on Weibo, the leading microblogging site run by Sina, and then from other Twitter-like sites and online discussion groups.     

No discussion of dissent
The tight restrictions on media coverage and Internet discussion of the protests in Egypt isn’t much of a surprise.  Beijing, after all, played from the same rulebook in July 2009 after riots broke out between ethnic Han Chinese and Uighurs in Xinjiang. Internet and cell phone services were immediately cut off in the northwestern province and were only reinstated very gradually over the following year. 

There’s been no public official pronouncement, of course, on the information restrictions, but an editorial in the Global Times, a state-run newspaper with strong nationalist leanings, reinforced the fact the Chinese government tolerates no discussion that might lead to questions about its supremacy:

“[D]emocracy has been accepted by most people. But when it comes to political systems, the Western model is only one of a few options. It takes time and effort to apply democracy to different countries, and to do so without the turmoil of revolution.”

The Chinese, of course, know a little something about the turmoil of revolution. The scars from China’s 20th century upheavals – the Great Leap Forward (1959-61) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), to name just two that caused the deaths of tens of millions – have left the Chinese government, and arguably the Chinese people, with little appetite for political instability.

At least that’s what some China-watchers are betting.

Is China next?
As the protests in Egypt entered their second or third day, and unrest appeared to spread to Lebanon and Yemen, foreign journalists began wondering aloud whether China would be next.  To some, it seemed obvious. The images of tanks rolling through the streets of Cairo, in particular, recalled the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and could well rekindle that kind of mass uprising in China.

In fact, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times arrived in Cairo’s Tahrir Square over the weekend and drew immediate comparisons to Tiananmen Square, which he’d covered for the newspaper. 

One reporter even point-blank asked U.S. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs at a press conference: “Does the U.S. believe – or do you think that China should be concerned in any way about what’s happening in Egypt? Or do you think it’s – they're such completely different societies and that this is mostly an Arab-Muslim thing at this point?”

Here, in the land of China-watchers, the question provoked confident responses of “No.”

‘Churning change…’
While acknowledging “anything is possible,” Richard Burger, a PR specialist who has lived in Taiwan and the mainland, explained why he believed China is different.

“China has done a far better job than Egypt and Tunisia in terms of keeping people employed and placated,” said Burger. “Its public works projects and subsidies of Chinese businesses have helped keep unemployment in check and, unlike in Tunisia, the mood in China [is] wildly optimistic.”

C. Custer over at ChinaGeeks, a China-watcher’s blog, is more circumspect, noting that the chief reason for Beijing’s sensitivity to Egypt coverage is because “the protests in Egypt are motivated by factors that exist in China, too: wealth disparity, corruption, censorship, etc. Of course, China is not Egypt. But the spin machine is still running.”

At the New Yorker, however, Evan Osnos, who has experience both in Egypt and in China, noted, “For all of China’s problems these days, the simple fact is that the dominant sensation in China is the polar opposite of that in Egypt: China is a place of constant, dizzying, churning change…[T]he lives of average Chinese citizens continue to improve fast enough that they see no reason to upturn the system.”

At any rate, today saw slightly more coverage of Egypt in the Chinese media. In part, that came because Beijing issued a warning to its citizens not to travel to Egypt and made arrangements for some 500 Chinese travelers currently stranded in Egypt to be evacuated by plane.

Whether that is the only ripple effect remains to be seen. 

Melissa Phillip / AP

Doaa Khedr, with her daughter, Maryam Ali, 1, protests along with others outside the Egyptian Consulate in Houston, Texas on Sunday. Click here to view a slideshow.

See a slideshow world reactions to Egypt's protest

1 February Update:

One more China pundit enters the fray.  Christina Larson at Foreign Policy notes a few more features that set China apart.  "There is no widespread seething anger towards China's rulers equivalent to what exists in Tunisia and Egypt," she writes.  "In recent years, high-profile protests in China have erupted over specific grievances – ethnic tensions, land rights, environmental degradation among them – but they have not touched Beijing.”

But perhaps all this speculation is misdirected.  As Adam Minter writes, “It might be better – if not more empirical – to step back and ask whether China has sufficient, robust institutions whereby average Chinese citizens can vent their frustrations, anger, and grievances.”