SHANGHAI – Police squelched overt protests in China for a second Sunday in a row after more calls came for peaceful gatherings modeled on recent democratic movements in the Middle East.

• Near Shanghai’s People’s Square, uniformed police blew whistles nonstop and shouted at people to keep moving, although about 200 onlookers and quiet sympathizers braved the shrill noise.

• In Beijing, trucks normally used to water the streets drove repeatedly up the busy commercial shopping district spraying water and keeping crowds pressed to the edges.

Foreign journalists met with tighter police controls.

In Shanghai, authorities called foreign reporters Sunday, indirectly warning them to stay away from the protest sites.

And police in Beijing followed some reporters and blocked those with cameras from entering the Wangfujing shopping street where protests were called.

Bloomberg News said at least five men who appeared to be plainclothes security assaulted one of its reporters, confiscated his video camera and detained him in a store until uniformed police arrived.

Police also detained several Chinese, at least two in Beijing and four in Shanghai, putting them into vans and driving them away, although it was not clear if they had tried to protest.

While it isn’t clear how many people came to protest, the outsized response compared with last week shows how the mysterious calls for protest have left the authoritarian government on edge.

Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, where popular frustrations with economic malaise added fuel to popular protests to oust autocratic leaders, China has a booming economy and rising living standards.

Still, the leadership is battling inflation and worries that democratic movements could take root if unchallenged.

“Rapid inflation affects people’s livelihoods and may affect social stability,” Premier Wen Jiabao said in an online chat Sunday.

While he did not mention the Middle East, he later added: “I know the impact that prices can cause a country and am deeply aware of its extreme importance.”

Online posts of unknown origin that first circulated on an overseas Chinese news website 10 days ago have called for Chinese to gather peacefully at sites every Sunday in a show of people power meant to promote fairness and democracy. A renewed call this week expanded the target cities to 27, from 13.