China Town Sealed After Police Shootings

BEIJING (AP) -- Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting demonstrators and searched for the protest organizers, villagers said Friday.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CHINA_PROTEST_SHOOTINGS?SITE=WKHG&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

In the good-old-bad-old days we would never hear about this. The Chinese government must be really worried about all those cells phones in the hands of ordinary people.

Whoever wrote that headline should be moved to a job for which he's better qualified - janitor, maybe.

...as the flow of information throughout China increases perceptions of the gap between old-line have-nots and newly rich haves.

Large-scale communist governments in the 20th Century recognized that suppression of information was vital to state control. Secret police were the tool of choice to enforce that suppression. Secret, as in all the violence took place out of the public and international purview.

They're shooting their own people. Ok, nothing new there. The key point is, as the O.P. noted, we heard about it.

The Chinese leadership is hung upon the horns of a dilemma: modern economic growth depends on free exchange of information, but the government fears that more knowledge - especially, knowledge about how things work outside of China - will lead to their demise.

China's political situation has been severely stressed by its manufacturing successes, far than many have realized. Nervous governments make desperate moves. Change in China's political structure won't lag too far behind the sweeping changes in its economy.

Peace.

...crowd of thousands protesting against inadequate compensation offered by the government for land to be used for a new wind power plant.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper on Saturday quoted Dongzhou villagers as saying authorities were trying to cover up the killings by offering families money to give up the bodies of the dead.

"They offered us a sum but said we would have to give up the body," an unidentified relative of one slain villager, 31-year-old Wei Jin, was quoted as saying. "We are not going to agree."

Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control in 1997, but the former British colony maintains a high degree of press freedom. Its proximity to Dongzhou gives local reporters good access to events there.