Bob Dole kept shouting that phrase, somewhat pathetically, throughout his campaign against our last real president, and it’s worth repeating in regard to that village none of us heard of until a couple of weeks ago, Dongzhou. Yes, I’m beating a dead horse, but this horse needs to be beaten. The news keeps getting scarier, and as usual, most people in the West don’t care: China’s just too far away, and it all seems too abstract. With Tiananmen Square, we had the drama of non-stop CNN newsfeeds. This time, all we have are eyewitness accounts offered in fear and anonymity. But this story needs to be told, and if we lose interest it’ll be repeated all to soon and swept once more under the convenient carpet of fading memories.

Dongzhou is the latest of the big CCP coverups. With each one, we are told by the believers that it was a turning point, and the future will be different. But this time, it’s all too obvious things have regressed in every way, and the openness we were promised Hu and Wen would deliver is as elusive as ever.

Inquiries last week established that the death toll in Dongzhou, near Shanwei city, on a night of violence on December 6 was closer to the 20 claimed by villagers than to the three acknowledged by the government.

An angry demonstration over compensation for land ended with village women on their knees, burning joss sticks as they pleaded with the police for the bodies of their menfolk.

Despite censorship and a ruthless dragnet for witnesses, villagers have communicated detailed allegations that people were mown down in a volley of automatic weapons fire, were murdered inside a police armoured vehicle and that some corpses were tossed into the sea. They also smuggled out photographs showing wounded victims lying on makeshift stretchers with blood pouring from apparent gunshot injuries to their heads and upper bodies.

There are persistent reports that even now secret police agents are offering money for hidden corpses and are trying to buy empty cartridge casings to suppress forensic evidence.

On December 6 the villagers took to the streets. Xinhua, the state news agency, said they had spears, knives, Molotov cocktails and dynamite.

“It’s untrue,” said a villager, speaking by phone. “We had just home-made fireworks.”

Whatever the truth, the official in charge, Wu Sheng, vice-director of the Shanwei Public Security Bureau, ordered his men to fire. He has since been detained by prosecutors. The state-controlled Guangzhou Daily said that he had “mishandled” the situation.

Several villagers spoke of 10 people mown down in one burst of fire and accounts on overseas Chinese websites said they had found eight to 10 bodies scattered on the grass afterwards.

“It was so brutal,”a man called Chen told the anti-communist Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong. “One villager was shot in the leg. He knelt down to beg for his life. But they dragged him over to a pile of grass and shot him twice.”

The testimony given by a villager to Grace Kei Lai-see, a reporter for the Cantonese service of Radio Free Asia, points to a killing frenzy.

“That night there were injured people who were dragged aboard police vehicles and shot to death,” the witness said. “The police then took the bodies to the crematorium near the beach but because there was no signature on the death certificates for cremation, they threw the bodies into the sea instead.

“This definitely happened. The bodies were discovered when they began to float.”

In accounts repeated over and over to journalists, villagers spoke of 13 or more bodies floating in the sea.

The determination of people to get their story across is building the “December 6 incident” into the biggest known loss of civilian life at the hands of the Chinese state since the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989.

How ironic that in his comparison of how different media were covering the Dongzhou story, eswn wrote the following:

The Epoch Times item at the bottom stands out from the rest. If everyone else refers to several hundred or more than 1,000 police officers, they say 2,000 to 3,000. If everybody else refers to three dead with names given, they say more than ten dead instead. If everybody else refers to tear gas canisters fired at close quarters as the cause of death, they say that the armed police sprayed the villagers with submachine gunfire instead.

The irony is, of course, that eswn was saying how ridiculous it would be for Epoch Times to say such things, when in fact those appear to be the very things that happened! (And I distruct Epoch Times as much as eswn does, by the way.) Yes, this was the real thing – rampant, ruthless murder of a large number of innocents and the bloodiest event in China (that we know of) since June 4, 1989. So where’s the outrage?

Apologies in advance, because I’m not through with this story yet, even though People’s Daily swears Dongzhou is now serene and peaceful, a happy, charming village where a few thugs once caused some trouble, but where joy and love and the success of China’s unique brand of socialism have once more succeeded in generating a strong bond of unity, harmony, stablity and love. And they all lived happily ever after.

Don’t lose the outrage.