In both cases police roughed up protesters, hundreds of whom were arrested and trucked away to detention centers. In both cases, there were echoes of past student demonstrations, where a desperate "nothing left to lose" mentality reigned, leading to the defiant occupation of a symbolic location near the seat of government.

  In the ranks of the hardcore Bangkok protesters camped out on the street, rain or shine, it is hard to find anyone of working age, let alone any youth. It's fair to say a good percentage of the protesters are grandparents. I suspect it's not so much that the protesters' children and children's children don't care about the dwindling number of fish in the Moon River, but they're preoccupied with work and school.

  The uncanny similarities between the two cases of provincial folk taking their protests to the city do not diminish several important differences. The causes being protested are as different as night and day and the nature of the state in which the protests are taking place must be given due consideration.

  The Thai protesters were not arrested for protesting, but for scaling a fence and occupying the lawn of Government House; like their counterparts in Seattle or Washington, they were arrested for deliberate civil disobedience.

  In democratic Thailand, the Pak Moon demonstrations have been going at it for eight years, mostly in the deep countryside along the banks of the Moon River where two unpopular dams were commissioned without heeding the input of the people most affected. Prolonged occupations of the dams and state facilities adjacent to the dams have been tolerated, and although protest leaders have been served arrest warrants, little action has been taken. The protests have been tolerated but they have not been given much attention by Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai's embattled government.

  Bangkok Gov. Bhichit Ratakul, working to defuse a potentially volatile situation in his last few weeks on the job, had graciously provided portable toilets and tanks of clean water for the rural visitors.

  China's press, in contrast, is not free to report on the Falun Gong protests at all. China's newspapers and TV stations not only cannot voice their own observations or opinions on the matter, but are not free to remain silent either. Press outlets are required to air the government's official line, which calls for denouncing Falun Gong in the most vitriolic language imaginable, as articulated by Xinhua News Agency.

  Falun Gong held an underground press conference for Beijing's foreign correspondents late last year. It was a bold move for a banned organization in a country where journalists are routinely tailed. Not surprisingly, many of the Chinese who participated were later arrested and four foreign reporters were reprimanded.

  Probably the most striking difference between the peasant protests in Bangkok and Beijing are that the aims and goals of the Thai peasant movement are rational and pragmatic, whereas the aims and goals of the Chinese peasant movement are based on superstition and the personality cult of a mystic leader.

  In both China and Thailand, thousands of rural activists have recently taken trains to the capital city to vent their grievances in the most public way possible. They join the ranks of rural migrants, numbering in the millions already, and can blend in and find support in this sea of displaced rural folk.

 Philip Cunningham is an independent journalist based in Bangkok.