The Chinese crack down on a rural protest. People are killed.

The local provincial government detains/arrests the commander involved, according to the law, they claim.

Meanwhile, Beijing tries to suppress all media on the subject.

How many minds are the Chinese on this one? As many as you care to name. We are watching a slow-motion revolution from within. Not pretty. Plenty of setbacks and leaps forward. Awkward as hell.

Here's the opening from the usually fine Howard French:

Beijing Casts Net of Silence Over Protest

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Published: December 14, 2005

New York Times

SHANGHAI, Dec. 13 - One week after the police violently suppressed a demonstration against the construction of a power plant in China, leaving as many as 20 people dead, an overwhelming majority of the Chinese public still knows nothing of the event.

In the wake of the biggest use of armed force against civilians since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Chinese officials have used a variety of techniques - from barring reports in most newspapers outside the immediate region to banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google - to prevent news of the deaths from spreading.

Beijing's handling of news about the incident, which was widely reported internationally, provides a revealing picture of the government's ambitions to control the flow of information to its citizens, and of the increasingly sophisticated techniques - a combination of old-fashioned authoritarian methods and the latest Internet technologies - that it uses to keep people in the dark.

The government's first response was to impose a news blackout, apparently banning all Chinese news media from reporting the Dec. 6 confrontation. It was not until Saturday, four days later, with foreign news reports proliferating, that the official New China News Agency released the first Chinese account.

According to that report, more than 300 armed villagers in the southern town of Dongzhou "assaulted the police." Only two-thirds of the way into the article did it say that three villagers had been killed and eight others injured when "the police were forced to open fire in alarm."

But even that account was not widely circulated, and it was highly at odds with the stories told by villagers, who in several days of often detailed interviews insisted that 20 or more people had been killed by automatic weapons fire and that at least 40 were still missing.

The government's version, like a report the next day in which authorities announced the arrest of a commander who had been in charge of the police crackdown, was largely restricted to newspapers in Guangdong Province ...

See the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/international/asia/14china.html