This is how China deals with dissent:
The men outside shouted among themselves and those in uniform suddenly left. Those remaining started pushing on the car, screaming at us to get out. They pointed flashlights at us, and when the light hit Mr Lu’s face, it was as if a bomb had gone off. They completely lost it. They pulled him out and bashed him to the ground, kicked him, pulverised him, stomped on his head over and over again. The beating was loud, like the crack of a wooden board, and he was unconscious within 30 seconds.
They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men. This was not about teaching a man a lesson, about scaring me, about preventing access to the village; this was about vengeance – retribution for teaching villagers their legal rights, for agitating, for daring to hide.
There’s no hiding the fact that China is still run by savages.
Yeah, it’s not like he was Filiberto Ojedo Ríos or that guy who wasn’t drunk in New Orleans.
This is a man who was deliberately beaten to death by his government because of the political opinions he expressed. That’s something we don’t do in America, as your continuing existence proves.
Don’t know whether you’ve seen the follow up by now, Richard? It seems the original report, in all its searing, persuasive “from our own Guardian correspondent in Shanghai” eyewitness detail was – at the very least – factually awfully exaggerated.
There are absolutely no winners on this one. Pissed off Chinese government officials confirmed in their paranoia that the West prints lies. Courageous dissidents like Lu Banglie ill-served by being falsely martyred by the Guardian and serious doubts again raised by the Guardian’s ability to report accurately (cf. New Orleans, Bush taking dictation from God etc).
There is one winner, after a fashion: Mr. Lu.