Here's a chance to read about successful stability management operations, or at least that’s what this article broadly claims, originally published by People’s Daily and then passed on via m4, a pro-government overseas Chinese website. I haven’t seen any other English language coverage of this incident so can’t link to anything for comparison.
The cause of the affair was a fatal road accident, details of which the demonstration organisers say were hushed up. According to the account, they didn’t get many takers for their demonstration outside the city government despite energetic recourse to gongs and funerary rites and so the incident was easy to suppress.
Maybe this is best looked at as a case study of an incident which either failed to take off or which was successfully suppressed, perhaps either because the original reason didn’t really catch on or because the organisers apparently chose to mobilize through an open bulletin board.
Worth noting here are the facts that the authorities chose to stress the apparent lenience with which they treated the organisers and that it offered a detailed rebuttal, rather than just blaming “some people spreading rumours” or “foreign influences”. This perhaps provides the groundwork for eventually generating a plausible narrative about “incident chasing”, for want of a better phrase.
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