Whenever I see Shenzhen, a Chinese city I never heard of until I visited it, I think about some things told to us by a German couple on the shuttle bus ride to the train station. My traveling companion, an evangelical Christian, asked a setup question about freedom of religion in China, expecting to hear that there was persecution forcing Christianity underground. “There is total freedom in China,” answered the man (living in Shenzhen as an entrepreneur), “as long as the religion does not challenge the authority of the government.” In other words, the government doesn’t have the resources to police insignificant personal choices and only bothers with threats.
So when people take to the streets in Shenzhen (which is to Shanghai what Chicago was to New York in the great US economic expansion back in the post-Civil War years, second best but no slacker), I don’t see it as a spontaneous demonstration. And when reliable services such as CNN report “massive demonstrations” I know exactly what they mean. This is fake news, something not totally unfamiliar to our government and reliable news services such as CNN. I’ve been in Asian cities when events such as this were staged and didn’t even know they were happening. Seoul, for example, is a very large city and if 100,000 people do decide to spontaneously demonstrate they would be sufficiently dispersed to make it impossible to tell anything was happening. No, it has to be centrally located, organized, the news cameras have to be there, and there has to be minimally tacit government approval and there is probably government encouragement (which can be as convincing as Mafia encouragement), much as we recently saw here at Pinellas Park, FL.
If you are there, everything goes on as normal. The trains run on time and everybody still go to work, shopping, and out for dinner. The nightclubs stay open and there still is dancing. Even if the demonstration is anti-American, the locals are still polite to Americans. If you ask a cab driver to take you to the site of the demonstration, he will try to discourage you. It will be difficult to distinguish between the demonstration and a normally crowded hotspot. The giveaway is the signs. People out for a night on the town don’t carry angry signs.
When CNN tells me people in Shenzhen are protesting the likely inclusion of China in the UN Security Council, I know my friends River, Enoch, and Jelly (they have a wonderful practice of taking English nouns as courtesy names to ease international business) are going to work as usual and are probably hearing less about the demonstrations than we are. I know that view angles of the cameras recording the event are set to be as wide as possible without showing the boundaries. This gives the impression that there are no boundaries, that all of China is there. I know that Western news services are complicit in this deception, probably with the tacit approval of their governments,
I say all this not to minimize the reasons the Chinese government does not want Japan on the Security Council. Just think Nanking in WWII. People over here still get upset about Pearl Harbor and that is orders of magnitude less. All I’m really saying is that there always is a reason when manufactured news is reported. Don’t ask me what it is this time, I don’t know for sure, but it concerns the UN and I suspect it has something to do with John Bolton. Just a guess.
10:41:40 AM 
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