April 30 (Bloomberg) -- After enduring almost a month of worldwide protests over the Olympic torch relay, China's leaders are now more concerned about demonstrations at home that take their side.

With anonymous Internet and text messages urging a boycott tomorrow of Carrefour SA's Chinese supermarkets and mass rallies to counter pro-Tibet protests against the torch in France and elsewhere, the government is urging citizens in editorials and statements to express their patriotism ``rationally.''

The concern is that the demonstrations will undermine government plans to soften its image through the Olympics, and may even threaten the Communist Party's decades-long control of public opinion and action.

``From an organizational and social mobilization point of view, it's something the government doesn't want,'' said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley. ``They want the Olympics to be a coming-out party.''

Chinese leaders have been trying to damp the fervor since thousands demonstrated in at least nine cities 10 days ago. Paris based Carrefour, the biggest foreign retail chain in China by sales, is bracing for more demonstrations after those on April 19 and 20. Picketers yelled and waved signs reading ``Say No to French Imperialists'' and ``Protest France Encouraging Violence and Grabbing Our Olympic Torch.''

Paris Relay

France drew special ire after a protester jostled a wheelchair-bound Chinese athlete during the Paris relay on April 7 and French President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to rule out a boycott of the Olympic opening ceremony. The relay was cut short and the torch put on a bus.

Sarkozy responded by sending three special envoys to China last week, including French Senate President Christian Poncelet. Poncelet delivered a letter of ``sympathy'' to Jin Jing, the Paralympics athlete jostled in Paris. Former Prime Minister Jean- Pierre Raffarin and Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy's top diplomatic adviser, also visited last week.

It didn't help. One e-mail urges ``patriotic countrymen'' to gather in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and 19 other cities every day between May 1 and May 4 for ``harmonious Olympics'' rallies. The message suggests marchers go to Western embassies, Carrefour stores and McDonald's Corp. restaurants, and provides such slogans as ``overthrow traitors to China.'' An e-mail to the address at the bottom of the message received no reply.

Another text message received by Bloomberg News calls for a 17-day boycott of Carrefour from May 8 to May 24 -- the same days of the month as the August Olympics.

Cancelled Sale

About 15 of Carrefour's 112 China stores were hit by protests in the past two weeks, lowering sales, Jacques Beauchet, a member of the management committee, told BFM radio on April 28. The Paris-based company canceled a three-day sale scheduled for the May 1 holiday in China to show ``high respect and full understanding of the Chinese people's current feelings,'' according to a statement.

``We have to bear in mind that a large part of the Chinese population was very much shocked by the incidents that marred the passage of the Olympic torch through Paris,'' Chairman Jose Luis Duran told the French newspaper Journal du Dimanche in its April 20 edition. The company confirmed the comment.

Editorials began appearing in state-controlled Chinese media immediately after the April 19 demonstrations calling on citizens to be rational and focus on individual and national development. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu disavowed ``extreme'' individual action while calling expressions of patriotism ``moving'' on April 22.

`Social Stability'

``We must cherish patriotism and at the same time express it rationally,'' said an April 20 editorial in the state-run People's Daily newspaper. ``Only in this way can we safeguard social stability.''

Li Yuanhui, a 20-year-old student at Beijing Union University, said the head of the school last week told students that demonstrating in front of local Carrefour stores was extreme and they shouldn't participate.

The government is also instructing Web sites to filter content related to the boycott campaign, according to Xiao of the China Internet Project. A search for the Chinese name of Carrefour on Google's China Web site brings a message that the engine cannot access that information, while the same search on Google on a Hong Kong server, outside China's Internet control system, gets 6 million hits.

As indignation threatens to tarnish its Olympic party, the success of the Chinese government's own rhetoric puts it in a bind: wary of suppressing legitimate patriotism, yet eager to control a spontaneous grassroots movement.

Double-Edged Sword

``Any kind of mobilization like this can be a double-edged sword,'' said Dali Yang, a political scientist and director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.

The nationalist fervor has a precedent. Protests erupted in 1999 after the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by a NATO aircraft, an incident the U.S. said was a mistake. Demonstrators in China, believing the bombing was deliberate, hurled stones at the U.S. embassy in Beijing and stormed the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, a city in southwestern China, before the government moved to quell the unrest.

This month's furor comes amid soaring food prices and a 29 percent decline in the CSI 300 stock index this year. China's government may be worried that public opinion, once unleashed, will lock onto those issues, Yang said.

``You do have rising inflation in China -- a lot of elements of instability,'' he said. ``When you have volatile public sentiment combined with all these other things, any government would be concerned.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Dune Lawrence in Beijing at dlawrence6@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 29, 2008 18:20 EDT