Enraged about Japan’s tendentious textbooks and territorial disputes in the East China Sea, Sun Wei, a college junior, joined thousands of Chinese in a rare legal protest march on the streets of Beijing last weekend.
Yet the police herded protesters into tight groups, let them take turns throwing rocks, then told them they had “vented their anger” long enough and bused them back to campus.
“It was partly a real protest and partly a political show,” Mr. Sun said in an interview this week. “I felt a little like a puppet.”