DAXING, China — Since Tunisian revolutionaries this year anointed their successful revolt against the country’s dictatorial president the “Jasmine Revolution,” this flowering cousin of the olive tree has been branded a nefarious change agent by the skittish men who keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.
Beginning in February, when anonymous calls for a Chinese “jasmine revolution” began circulating on the Internet, the Chinese characters for jasmine have been intermittently blocked in cellphone text messages while videos of President Hu Jintao singing “Mo Li Hua,” a Qing dynasty paean to the flower, have been plucked from the Web. Local officials, fearful of the flower’s destabilizing potency, canceled this summer’s China International Jasmine Cultural Festival in south China, said Wu Guangyan, manager of the Guangxi Jasmine Development and Investment Co.
Even if Chinese cities have been free from any whiff of revolutionary turmoil, the war on jasmine has not been without casualties, most notably the ever-expanding list of democracy advocates, bloggers and other would-be troublemakers who have been pre-emptively detained by public security agents, among them artist provocateur Ai Weiwei, who remains in police custody after being seized at Beijing’s international airport last month.
Less well known are the tribulations endured by the men and women who grow ornamental jasmine here in Daxing, a district on the rural fringe of the capital. They say prices have collapsed since March, when the police issued an open-ended jasmine ban at a number of retail and wholesale flower markets around Beijing.
Zhen Weizhong, 47, who tends 2,000 jasmine plants on about an acre of rented land here, said the knee-high potted variety were wholesaling for about 75 cents, one-third of last year’s price.
“Even if I could sell them, I would lose money on every plant,” he said, glancing forlornly at a mound of unsold bushes whose blossoms were beginning to fade.
Asked whether he knew about the so-called jasmine revolution and whether it had played a role in collapsing demand, Zhen shrugged.
“I don’t know anything about politics,” he said. “I don’t have time to watch television.”
In the absence of concrete information, fantastical rumors have taken root. A young woman hawking floral bouquets at Laitai, a large flower market near the U.S. Embassy, said she was told jasmine blossoms contained some unspecified poison that was killing people.
