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The disappointment among some foreign observers was palpable when an online appeal to replicate the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China fell flat on Sunday.

But what some have failed to notice is that the call did produce a mirror image in the real world of the phenomenon at the heart of China’s fledgling online public sphere: crowds of onlookers.

The rapid rise of the microblog in China over the past year has managed to shine a spotlight on many local incidents of unrest that in the past would have remained hidden.

Online activists have compared the act of ‘following’ a certain person or event on a microblog with the behaviour of onlookers who quickly form a crowd when a conflict happens in the street. And while for now most Chinese citizens are not ready to challenge the government openly, many are happy to be onlookers.

The protest call managed to briefly replicate this online phenomenon in the real world.

However, the event also mirrored the different digital flows of information reaching different parts of the Chinese population as a result of Beijing’s heavy web censorship.

The call brought out mainly foreign journalists and police, plus a smaller number of government critics watching from the sidelines with great expectations.

All of them had got their information by ‘jumping the Wall’ – accessing foreign-registered websites which are blocked inside China, by circumventing internet controls commonly called the ‘Great Firewall of China’.

Chinese-language messaging volume on Twitter jumped to record levels at the weekend as the appeal was passed on and dissidents discussed the government’s countermeasures. But many of those most active in leading this discourse live abroad, and the numbers of those in China are tiny compared with users of Twitter’s Chinese, censored, clones.

Many more onlookers at the Sunday protest identified themselves as users of the Sina microblog, China’s largest, but said they had no idea what the gathering was about. The explanation of a planned ‘Jasmine revolution’ in China drew a stare of disbelief on most of the young faces.

That is the government’s intended result. In the face of the call for revolution, Beijing has stepped up its net censorship. China must “further strengthen and improve controls on the information web, raising our level of control over virtual society, and perfecting our mechanisms for the channeling of public opinion online,” president Hu Jintao said on Saturday.