Dongzhou: An 80-year-old essay takes on new life

The Washington Post has an interesting story about the creative ways some Chinese internet users are fooling censors and managing to, vaguely at least, discuss the violent police crackdown in Dongzhou earlier this month. A forum post masked as a discussion about Lu Xun's 1926 essay "In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen" -- written in response to a Beijing massacre that year -- drew thousands of comments recently:

Another ... forum set up as a "silent memorial" to the victims of the shooting drew nearly 30,000 visits. And in a third forum, users from across the country posted a series of short messages containing variations of a simple protest against censorship: "I know."

"They don't want me to know, but I know."

"It's useless that I know, but I still know."

"Though I pretend not to know, I know."

"We express ourselves this way not because we're trying to hide from the authorities, but because we don't want them to delete what we're saying," said one of the participants, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "In fact, they probably know what we're doing, but they can't do anything about it. It's not a crime to talk about Lu Xun. But it's a form of protest."

Of course many Dongzhou related posts are getting erased shortly after they go up and sites are getting shut down. The beat goes on.

The New York Times' Howard W. French paints a current picture of the situation in Guangzhou -- and it isn't pretty. Local authorities are offering residents the option of hush money or beatings to keep quiet about the truth surrounding the Dec. 6 incident. And then there's the other disgusting dilemma faced by local authorities. When the official word is that only three protesters were killed by police in the clash, what to do with all those other dead bodies?

Photo from ESWN.