CHINA'S Internet police yesterday began clamping down on online campaigns calling for protests against French retailers in the mainland, as state media stepped up efforts to dampen the growing nationalist ire.

Anti-French sentiments hit a high yesterday as dozens of angry youths in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao burned a French flag while protesting outside a Carrefour store.

Several messages calling for similar protests to be held today have been posted on online forums here. However, the authorities seem to be deleting them as swiftly as they appear.

China has seen a spike in anti-Western sentiments in recent weeks after the Beijing Olympic torch relay was badly disrupted by protesters in cities such as London, Paris and San Francisco.

While activists and politicians in these cities see the protests as an expression of disagreement with China's policies, many ordinary Chinese view them as an attempt to humiliate China.

France has come under the harshest criticisms from the Chinese, many of whom see the Paris leg of the torch relay as the most chaotic and unfriendly. This has sparked calls for mainland consumers to retaliate by boycotting French retailers and goods.

Messages seen by The Straits Times yesterday called for protests today against French supermarket chain Carrefour in at least two Chinese cities - the capital Beijing and southern boomtown Shenzhen.

'We can't address the French government directly, but through this channel, we can let them understand the voices of the Chinese people. Let it be known that we are not to be bullied,'said one message.

While the messages professed to be advocating 'peaceful boycotts', the Chinese authorities took no chances and swiftly deleted or blanked out such postings.

Observers said Beijing could have been prompted to act by memories of the violent anti-Japanese riots in several Chinese cities three years ago. Those protests began similarly with calls to 'peacefully' boycott Japanese goods but turned violent - a scene Beijing would not like to see repeated just months before the Olympics.

The Chinese police have not commented on the calls for anti-French protests and boycotts, leaving commentators and media groups here to do the talking, for now.

China's official Xinhua news agency weighed in yesterday with a commentary calling for ordinary Chinese to act rationally, following similar calls by other popular newspapers this past week.

Meanwhile, the French Ambassador to China tried to repair his country's public image in China by giving the assurance that the protests that marred the Paris torch relay were not anti-Chinese.

In two interviews with the Chinese media on Thursday, Mr Herv Ladsous also stressed that France was 'a very close friend to China'.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on April 19, 2008