If Premier Wen Jiabao is China’s chief crisis manager, then Hu Jintao’s the architect of crisis aversion. From the Taiwan anti-secession bill to the Great Firewall of China, the Chinese leader has been a frequent practitioner of the tao of pre-emption. Now his government seems so insecure about the possibility that something might go wrong during the Olympics, it’s attempting to dictate most everything that goes on.

     Is there cause for panic inside the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai? Sure. Enforcement ebbs and flows in China. This is a system that bends its own rules daily based on money, personal connections and political mood swings. So the current season calls for a clampdown, and Communist Party leadership have ratcheted up demands for order, stability and unity high enough that they filter down to the lowest level of authority. 

     Such “security concerns”, in local dialect, translate into job security concerns. Any disruption on my watch, any troublemaker on my turf, and I’m done-for. Or so goes the present mindset among police, city management officials, and other petty functionaries. So better to eliminate any possibility thereof.

     That M.O. – in some cases, for lack of any clearer explanation – says a lot about why and how authorities have been clamping down on everything from visas to party venues in ways they have not since periods of the 1980’s and 90’s, and responded to recent turmoil swiftly and strongly. Beijing’s projection of strength within its borders can make it look inflexibly lame to the outside world. But to the Middle Kingdom, what's more important, internal or external perceptions?

      Come to think of it, the government’s handling of the recent riot deep down south in Guizhou offers an interesting case in point. Communist Party mandarins wasted little time in taking charge of the case and off-loading blame for it. That said, they have sent a mighty loaded message in the process. 

    Protests erupted June 28 in Weng’an county, you’ll remember, over rampant suspicions that a teenage girl said to have jumped into a river and drowned was in fact raped and killed; that two men with her on the bridge were related to police and party chiefs in the county; and that the girl’s uncle was beaten to death while pressing the family’s case – charges which local officials harshly rejected.

     Within two days of the riot, the provincial government opened a full investigation, backed by official instructions from Chinese leader Hu Jintao. Local authorities detained hundreds of rioters, ordered a third autopsy which they said confirmed the girl had drowned, and released eyewitness testimony of her friends and background on them in an effort to dispel all the “rumors” of foul play. They also pointed the finger at local gangs of petty criminals accused of instigating the crowd. Then, shifting gears, provincial authorities turned around and announced the sacking of two top cops in Weng’an on Thursday, and the two top cadres in the county on Friday. 

      No, no, local leaders were not implicated in any wrongful death or cover-up - for no such thing had occurred, the government maintained. Rather, provincial higher-ups skewered them for “severe malfeasance” in handling the protesters as well the underlying roots of unrest, according statements released by the Guizhou government media and the official news agency Xinhua:

[Provincial Party chief] Shi [Zongyuan] said the superficial trigger of the protest was the death of the 17-year-old student, but it was a "culmination of deep-rooted grudge" from the public over the local authorities' repeated violation of citizens' interests when they handled mines, residents' relocation and property demolition to may way for urban construction.

"Some officials neglected their duties, but resorted to police force when any dispute happened, which led to strained relations between officials and the people, and police and the public," Shi said.

He said some officials handled disputes involving these issues in a "rude and roughshod" manner.

Shi also blamed local authorities for long-standing disregard for rampant crime in the county and incompetence in maintaining public security.

He urged Weng'an officials to make the people's rights and interests their first priority and to deal with public grievances.

"If the people's rights and interests are hurt by improper polices or government decisions, we should admit mistakes and correct them promptly," he said.

He also told local government to strengthen construction of the cadre team and management of the police force and vowed to seriously punish those who covered up for criminals.

Guizhou’s deputy Party chief, Wang Fuyu, chimed in with an important sound bite about preemption:

Wang said the protests would not have happened "if local officials had communicated appropriately with the aggrieved people after the first sign of protest emerged."
 

     The verdict out of Guizhou will not have been lost on other local bosses across the country: Talk to the people when necessary. Avoid confrontation at all costs. This is no time to foul up.

     Over the years, Hu and Wen have launched a number of major initiatives – including education and tax relief, rules on official accountability, and Internet speech policing - aimed at tempering grassroots tensions arising from land redevelopment, corruption and miscarriage of justice. They’ve saddled local cadres with the duty of resolving disputes quickly and quietly.

     The sackings in Weng’an vaguely recalled the handling of a deadly siege three years ago in Dingzhou, a few hours’ drive from Beijing, where 150 armed thugs were bused in to run villagers off their land. Dingzhou’s top cadres were sacked within 48 hours and the land reclamation process they had overseen was declared illegal. But the extent of the local government’s role in the attack was never clearly established, and the peasants continued to be harassed, as did Chinese and foreign journalists covering their story.

          If it’s possible to compare the two cases, then the level of transparency this time around in Guizhou was a marked improvement. Then again, this was a protest that turned a town upside down, involving somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 citizens, and millions more following along on the Internet.

          The Guizhou government seems to have tamed the uproar over the past week, even though its message went muddy on much of China's mistrusting Netizenry. On Internet forums, people continue to poke holes in the official story of the girl’s death -- where they can, that is. Internet blocks on key forums and bloggers, and the dearth of independent coverage in state newspapers, has sustained people’s skepticism. Although the three witnesses hanging out with the girl before she died were finally allowed to meet with a group of ten reporters over the weekend, they basically parroted their official testimony of how the girl inexplicably jumped to her death. That left a lot of unanswered questions about her “suicide” motives.

      “Who simply says ‘Okay, I’m going’ and jumps off a bridge?” said Little Wang, my cantankerous bartender friend. I checked back in with him after the firings to sound out his feelings on China’s hottest news of the week. He was not convinced that the truth was known, or that justice was served. 

       “It’s sort of seems like that old Chinese proverb, ‘No 300 taels of silver here’,” he said. The proverb derives from a tale in which a man buries a stash of money and plants a sign by it saying that money is not there, which of course tips people off to the fact it is. The moral is that clumsy protests of innocence can betray one’s guilt.

      “If the officials had no connections at all to the death and weren’t covering anything up, would they really go so far as dismiss them from their posts? 

       Little Wang was not satisfied with the “malfeasance” line either. “The government says it [their punishments] were for a different reason, because of the protests themselves, the long-term problems, and so on. But if it was not for this incident, you would never have punished them at all!”

       Perhaps the higher authorities was just trying to make an example of them, I proposed. “Still, there are still a lot of inconsistencies here,” said Little Wang. Maybe if the Olympics weren’t happening, it would not have been dealt with this way.”