BEIJING (AFP) — Hundreds of protesters demonstrated Thursday outside stores belonging to French supermarket chain Carrefour in four cities in China, state media reported, in a new sign of anti-French sentiment.
Holding Chinese national flags, they shouted slogans against Carrefour and against independence for Tibet, the Xinhua news agency said.
The protesters also expressed support for the Beijing Olympics outside the Carrefour stores in Changsha, capital of the central province of Hunan, Fuzhou in the southeast, Shenyang in the northeast, and Chongqing in the southwest.
AFP could not immediately confirm the rallies, but Xinhua said hundreds of protesters turned up at 10:00am (0200 GMT) at a Carrefour store in Changsha.
They held banners saying "Support Olympics", "Oppose Tibet Independence", "Love China", and "Unity is Power", the news agency said, while around 200 of them tried to persuade people not to go into the store.
Many signed their names on the banners and joined chanting slogans, Xinhua added.
Police quickly blocked the entrance to "avoid accidents as there were too many people," a police officer told the news agency.
"I didn't see it (the rally) but heard that many people were protesting," a receptionist at the Fuyong Carrefour store in Changsha told AFP.
"There are not many clients today."
One of the protesters, a university student from Hengyang, 200 kilometres (125 miles) from Changsha, said he had arrived at 2:00am in order to support the rally.
Anti-French protests first broke out weeks ago amid anger at the chaotic nature of the Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay last month, when pro-Tibet activists tried to grab the flame from of a wheelchair-bound Chinese athlete.
Chinese were also angered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy's refusal to rule out staying away from the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing on August 8 unless it opened talks with Tibet's exiled leader the Dalai Lama.
The Chinese rumour mill had further turned up the heat by suggesting that Carrefour supported the Dalai Lama, charges it has denied.
Thursday's latest protests came despite signs that the Chinese government had been trying to choke off Internet-led attempts to mobilise the public for further rallies on May 1, which is a public holiday.
In Fuzhou, around 400 people gathered on a square in front of a Carrefour store, Xinhua said, and local officials and around 40 police also arrived to maintain order.
In Shenyang, a local police officer said he had heard about a protest at a Carrefour store in Shenhe district. "We heard about it, but we don't know any details," he told AFP.
It has become more difficult to use the Internet to rally support for any boycott drive or calls for protests against the French supermarket chain.
Present in China for the past 10 years, Carrefour opens a new store in the country every two weeks. It currently operates 122 hypermarkets and 280 other stores nationwide and claims two million customers every day.
Keyword searches for the Chinese word Carrefour on popular search engines recently yielded the message "the information you seek cannot be accessed," in a sign the government might be censoring some online content.
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