Okay, so Xinhua's English-language break on the attack beat the Chinese version by more than an hour. Early info on Monday’s ambush in Xinjiang was spotty too: the perpetrators' identities absent, and suspicions of a “terrorist” plot hence, as usual, thin at best. Then broadcaster CCTV, after releasing the first whiff of news in Chinese on its News Channel at noon, skipped the story entirely on the tightly scripted Evening News. By afternoon the news began tumbling down top news charts of Chinese news portals. And the next day the headline was a minor blip on the front pages of mainland papers. The story was dumped deep inside in a single-paragraph summary, at a fraction of the column inches used by official English-language coverage directed at foreign readers.

Yet one thing did impress about Chinese coverage of the Monday morning attack in Kashgar, in which two Uighurs reportedly killed 16 border police and wounded another 16: not that official media broke it, but that it did so with uncustomary hustle. The lag was a little over three hours. That’s swift for state media when it comes to an incident of this magnitude, delicacy and geographical remoteness from Beijing. It’s supersonic for news out of Xinjiang, where Chinese reports of violent plots by separatist Muslim Uighurs tend to be a challenge to confirm or deny. We foreign hacks are used to working our way back days or weeks to chase iffy revelations by Xinjiang officials or stingy official press matchers issued only in response to a Radio Free Asia dispatch or the like. That's the way it was as recently as this Spring, in fact, when the government took its leisurely time to acknowledge a spate of clashes and foiled plots.

The comparative burst of speed Monday was no fluke, Chinese journalists inform us. After the hurly burly the country went through the first half of the year, the Communist Party leadership is placing never-before-seen demands on government media to gain the edge on reporting serious disturbances and manage crises more deftly. Key to the strategy is to get the official scoop on events before overseas media do, particularly around the time of the Olympic Games.

In recent weeks the deputy head of the Party’s Central Publicity Department, Li Dongsheng, has hammered home this agenda in meetings with provincial propaganda counterparts and top representatives of “central media” organs, according to two sources within Party media organizations. According to one formulation, they and other Chinese journalists say, the orders are to diyi shijian qiangbao –to “grab” the news as soon as it happens. “Central media” include the Party papers People’s Daily and Guangming Daily, news wires Xinhua and the China News Service, broadcasters CCTV, China National Radio, and China Radio International, and official dailies China Daily and the Economic Daily. Provincial propaganda bosses would relay word to local government media as well.

Li instructed them that over the two-month “Olympic period” - July 20-September 20, through the time of Paralympics - official media should take greater initiative to report “major sudden incidents” (natural disasters, accidents, riots, terrorist attacks, etc.) . As usual, the Xinhua News Agency was intended to act as the clearing house for such news and all other Chinese media were under orders to pick up its reports. But Xinhua and other official media outlets were not necessarily to wait for explicit instructions from senior propaganda authorities before running with the news. The official embrace of up-to-the-minute news is no secret here; Beijing has been touting it in the context of new rules on official accountability and such events as the Sichuan earthquake, and the idea of an express lane for breaking events has been floating around Party propaganda circles for some time. But for the department to expressly grant such leeway is “unprecedented,” according to one of the Party media sources, who were briefed on the recent meetings. They spoke on condition of anonymity so as avoid repercussions.

As to how official outlets are to report a “sudden incident”, well, that's not going to change. Any such story still had to reflect official conventions and the Party line, or what is known in Party jargon as its “guidance of public opinion” - “not your Newsweek stuff,” as one of the sources put it. Moreover, the leeway to bypass some of the traditional channels only applied during Olympic period. “It’s still represents a new direction of transparency. It’s more open than before. In that way it’s still a form of progress,” he said, adding, “but right now only for the Olympics.”

Nor were the Party newsmen under any illusion as to the primary intent: to strengthen the authoritativeness of the Party, and minimize embarrassment to Beijing. That's especially vital with well over 20,000 foreign reporters descending on Beijing to cover the Games this week. In the briefings, Li and other propaganda bosses have made clear that the objective is try to beat them in the event of major disturbances – at least out of the blocks. (No, this does not in any way explain why on Tuesday police in Kashgar beat two Japanese journalists trying to report at the scene of Monday's attack).

Xinjiang was not the first big test case of the new M.O. on faster reporting. Reports of bus blasts in Kunming last Monday also appeared to embody the edict, sources said. “The thinking is that if you don’t report it first, the country will be on the defensive from the very start,” said the first source.

But the new M.O. did not rule out that some incidents would still remain under wraps, the other Party media journalist cautioned, pointing to information he had received from official sources of at least one other bombing incident outside Beijing in recent weeks (but which we could not independently verify). “You still cover up what you can cover up. But when you can’t cover it up, you have to report it first,” he summarized: “The point is to contest the foreign media for the right to speak.”

Propaganda's orders to get the scoop stemmed partly from the “spirit” of an “important speech” by Party boss Hu in late June, Li and other propaganda officials also made clear. Hu visited the Party flagship People’s Daily to fete its 60^th birthday, and used the occasion to articulate the media’s “active role” in “guidance of public opinion” (David Bandurski at the China Media Project offers insightful exegesis of what Hu meant). That in turn followed on the state media lessons of the first half of 2008, Li also explained - from the poor and sluggish reporting of snowstorms which plagued much of the country in January to the internationally recognized boon from coverage of Sichuan earthquake in May, and the nasty internationally waged battles over ethnic Tibetan unrest and the Olympic torch relay in-between. The new instructions were packaged as the sum-total learned from those experiences, the sources noted.

Li specifically addressed the case of Tibet, the sources said. Internally, propaganda authorities have recognized for months that the slowness to release news of the outbreak of Tibetan rioting in Lhasa was a mistake which abetted the public relations disaster internationally, they said. But after the initial paralysis, authorities were convinced, they clinched overriding domestic support and stood up to international condemnation by releasing TV clips of the Lhasa riots a few days later. Footage showed Tibetans torching cars and smashing storefronts.

“’Fifty-plus seconds of television footage surpassed the force of 100,000 soldiers,’” one of the sources cited the deputy propaganda boss saying.

Coverage of the international torch relay too had boosted the leadership’s confidence in its ability to engineer public opinion. In conversations in recent months, these sources and other Chinese media insiders have marveled at how the trajectory of nationalist protests corresponded directly to the degree of detail people were exposed to via official press. When protesters marred the opening legs in Athens and London, Chinese media were mum. But as details seeped in over the Internet from overseas media images and Chinese-language press, sources said, anti-foreign anger engulfed the Web. Netizens could read and watch in plain view what they were not being told.

The Chinese leadership took note. After the London leg, the sources said, Chinese media organs received orders from on-high to fangkai wangluo, fangkai minjian – code for “open up the Web, open up public opinion.” That order hit in the nick of time for the Paris leg, where demonstrators lunged at paraplegic torchbearer Jin Jing. This time, the handful of officially designated outlets of international news reported the scene, most notably the Global Times, a staunchly patriotic, often polemical newsstand tabloid published by the People’s Daily. Its file from Paris got top billing on the mainland news portals. Soon people were clamoring for boycotts and protests against the French hypermarket Carrefour. But in fact, Carrefour became a target somewhat by happenstance. “The Paris protests were not really bigger than London but the backlash here was much, much bigger,” said one of the sources. “Because they were publicized.”

As soon as domestic protests threatened to spiral onto the streets, though, the government began tightening the few mainland spigots of overseas news on the torch relay. Clashes in South Korea were the last to be featured. By the time of the Japan leg the taps were turned off, just before Hu was to make a historic trip there.

The torch relay to-do seems to have shown the leadership that a few carefully parsed nuggets of fresh reporting can work more powerfully than decades of patriotic government rhetoric. “They definitely feel their propaganda strategy was ultimately successful,” commented one of the Party media sources. Domestically, since at least as early as late April, the Party leadership has conceived the publicity war over Tibet and the torch relay as a victory over the dreaded nightmare of “peaceful evolution” – shorthand for Western-style democratization and the peaceful overthrow of the Party. “The torch relay completely failed in its original aims” – that is, displaying before the world China’s benevolent progress – “but they won a much bigger victory, and this victory was not expected at all,” explained another Party media source. “Many young people got to see up close that the West is not always so friendly, that the West’s peaceful evolution was not such a good thing.” He added: “Two decades of patriotic education could not make the same impact.”

At one recent meeting, sources said, Li opined that the Party had faced the greatest risk of “peaceful evolution” when the “third” or “fourth generation” of Red babies born since the Communist takeover in 1949, i.e. in the 60’s and 70’s, came of age. That danger passed in the 1980’s and 90’s, and the Party survived. With the fifth and sixth generations, born in the 80’s and 90’s and coming of age today, Li said there was “basically not a chance [of peaceful evolution].”