AsiaPundit is, for better or worse, a journalist by day. While blogging tradition is to shoot from the hip without a full array of evidence, the day job demands a bit more. On the Dongzhou incident, AP has been pretty silent. That’s largely AP relying on instinct. It’s better to be slow than to be wrong, even though it’s bad to be either.

There’s a lot of chatter on the matter, but with death tolls between three (the unreliable CPP service Xinhua) and 70 (unreliable FLG rag Epoch Times) it’s hard to find a source of clarity.

One thing that is certain, as Richard at Peking Duck states, is that things are "a serious mess".:

The whole thing is extraordinary. Hundreds of riots occur in China every day, but, as the article says, police and paramilitary forces rarely shoot civilian demonstrators. Xinhua, as I posted yesterday, put out a lengthy article claiming it was all about thuggish "instigators" who were wickedly inciting the villagers, who the poor law enforecement officials were "forced" to shoot down. And within 12 hours, that Xinhua article vanished. Somewhere within that period of time someone in the government apparently realized just how serious a mess this was, and that trying to scapegoat the demonstrators wasn;t going to work.

Meanwhile, since the Xinhua article came and went, there seems to be a blackout on news coming out of China; a Google News search shows it’s only the foreign press that’s covering it (with plenty of sensational coverage from Epoch Times, of course).

ESWN has, as always, provided better coverage than widely available elsewhere - though as by consolidating reports rather than reporting. Gateway Pundit has a decent roundup of images and videos which are well worth watching even though many are sourced by the Epoch Times. (AP will more-or-less trust Epoch Times visual evidence, that’s much harder to fake than CPC resignations).

(On the FLG, AP finds them about as reliable as the Scientologists, but he does not take the CPC line on the movement.  Note, AP would not care to see Tom Cruise tortured to death just because he has nutty ideas about psychiatry, has corrupted Katie Holmes and was so nuts that he would divorce a hottie like Nicole Kidman. Although all of that would probably be more of a reason for torturing Tom than what the CPC has tortured FLG members for. AP opposes torture, even against Tom Cruise.)

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