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Saturday, December 17, 2005

When Will the Chinese Communist Party Learn that Secrecy is No Longer an Option?

Besides being brutally insensitive, it is inexcusably ignorant for the central government, or anyone within it, to help local authorities cover up the recent riots and killings in Dongzhou, a coastal village in south China's Guangdong Province, close by more enlightened Hong Kong. We live in a world that is no longer plausible-deniability friendly. Although many say there is no purely "free press" anywhere in that same world, 'truth,' in all its abstract, idiosyncratic guises, and rumor will disseminate almost instantly, beyond control or regulation of anyone or anything (outside of North Korea, of course).

If lying about public events or issues used to be stupid because it meant you had to be smart enough to remember which lie you told when and where to whom, now it is flat-out unimaginably dumb!

But, obviously, some folks just cannot figure it out. Which is about all of the comment necessary for me to excerpt a bit from, and then link to, an article in today's The New York Times.
Chinese Pressing to Keep Village Silent on Clash

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: December 17, 2005

SHANGHAI, Dec. 16 - Ten days ago, the sleepy fishing village of Dongzhou was the scene of a deadly face-off, with protesters hurling homemade bombs and the police gunning them down in the streets.

Now, a stilted calm prevails, a cover-up so carefully planned that the small town looks like a relic from the Cultural Revolution, as if the government had decided to re-educate the entire population. Banners hang everywhere, with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, "Stability is paramount" and "Don't trust instigators."

Many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec. 6, which residents say ended in the deaths of 20 or more people, but one thing is certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent witnesses' accounts of what happened from emerging.

Residents of Dongzhou, a small town now cordoned off by heavy police roadblocks and patrols, said in scores of interviews on the telephone and with visitors that they had endured beatings, bribes and threats at the hands of security forces in the week and a half after their protest against the construction of a power plant was violently put down. Others said that the corpses of the dead had been withheld, apparently because they were so riddled with bullets that they would contradict the government's version of events. And residents have been warned that if they must explain the deaths of loved ones - many of whom were shot dead during a tense standoff with the police in which fireworks, blasting caps and crude gasoline bombs were thrown by the villagers - they should simply say their relatives were blown up by their own explosives.

"Local officials are talking to families that had relatives killed in the incident, telling them that if they tell higher officials and outsiders that they died by accident, by explosives, while confronting the police, they must make it sound convincing," said one resident of the besieged town in an interview. "If the family members speak this way they are being promised 50,000 yuan ($6,193), and if not, they will be beaten and get nothing out of it."
Continue reading at: The New York Times
 


4:58 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments  

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2 Comments:

the Chinese will learn that "secrecy is no longer an option" when the Americans learn it first!!!

By Anonymous, at 5:29 AM  

Dear Anonymous,

A point well made and a point well taken--about the current United States Government, it is not even a debatable point.

Thank you for dropping by and taking the time to leave a comment.

Sincerely,

Joseph Bosco

By Joseph, at 4:19 PM  

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