Mass protests are rarely tolerated by the Chinese authorities. The lenience on Saturday provoked wry comments from many ordinary Chinese. "They say it is fine to denounce Japan, but the government must know that people have even more serious grievances against the state of affairs in our country," said a man named Zhang, who declined to provide his full name.

Another man, a 23-year-old barber in central Shanghai, where several shops catering to Japanese were destroyed, said he had nothing against Japan or Japanese people. "People are taking part in this march because they aren't allowed to protest anything else," he said. "In your country, people are allowed to demonstrate freely, so something like this probably wouldn't attract many people. Here we are never given a chance to protest, so everyone wants to see it for himself, to be there."