U.S. and European diplomats are decrying the harassment of foreign reporters in China who were trying to cover a call for peaceful protests in more than 20 Chinese cities.

On Sunday, for the second weekend in a row, a U.S.-based website called for pro-democracy "Jasmine Rallies" in the heart of major Chinese cities.

The site called for people to walk by selected locations in the heart of several Chinese cities to show their support.

But the planned rallies put Chinese authorities on edge. They turned out in force to squash the protests before they began, keeping crowds moving and arresting some who disobeyed.

In Beijing, hundreds of officers just about shut down access to one of the city's main tourist streets. Several Chinese were detained or harassed. Trucks normally used to clean the streets drove repeatedly up the busy Wangfujing shopping district, spraying water and keeping crowds pressed to the edges.

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

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

Bloomberg News said one of its reporters was assaulted by plainclothes security and had a video camera confiscated. A BBC journalist wrote that he and a colleague were roughed up while being thrown into a van by plainclothes "thugs."

On Monday, U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman called the intimidation of reporters "unacceptable and deeply disturbing."

"I am disappointed that the Chinese public security authorities could not protect the safety and property of foreign journalists doing their jobs," he said in a statement.

The European Union delegation urged authorities to respect the rights of foreign journalists reporting in China.

It really isn't clear how many people responded to the call, says CTV Ben O'Hara-Byrne in Beijing.

"We've been having a very hard time figuring out just how much popular support these protests even have had –- if any at all," he told Canada AM Monday.

Not only has it been difficult to assess the size of the response, O'Hara-Byrne says it's been hard for Chinese themselves to get information on the protests, because news has been severely restricted.

The rallies are called "Jasmine Rallies" in honour of the Tunisian revolt and the unrest sweeping the Mideast at the moment, but finding mention of them on the Internet in China is next to impossible.

"Any search for the word ‘jasmine' has been blocked as well as searches for other key words," O'Hara-Byrne says.

"There has been so much censorship in this case, and so much police presence, it's impossible to tell if these rallies really have any support at all or whether they've simply been an exercise in figuring out just how prepared the police are to handle this kind of protest."

With reports from CTV's Beijing bureau chief Ben O'Hara-Byrne and the Associated Press