The Propaganda Department of the Communist Party Central Committee recently convened a meeting to launch a new media crackdown. The meeting focused on the directive of the Politburo that 2009 will be a year of both economic and political difficulty. The Politburo cited intelligence from both the Ministry of State Security and the Peoples Liberation Army General Staff Headquarters that 2009 would witness a high tide of anti-China activity both domestically and internationally. The Chinese government faces a serious challenge and crisis, and all preparatory and defensive measures must be taken.

20th Anniversary of June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square Military Crackdown Commemoration Activity Participant List

November 28 was visiting day at Shandong Province's Linyi Prison. Because she is under house arrest, Mrs. Yuan Weijing was not able to visit her imprisoned husband blind rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng for the 14th month in a row. But the rest of the family visited him and reported on his deteriorating medical condition. He has been suffering from diarrhea for the past four months, and his body weight has dramatically decreased. The family has urgently called on the prison authorities to allow Chen to be released on bail for a medical examination and treatment.

Yang Jia's Case: It's Not About the Truth
by Liu Di

http://canyu.org/n4325c6.aspx

The November issue of Hong Kong's Zhengming ["Contention"] magazine states that President Hu Jintao made a secret report to the Third Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee of the Communist Party, offering a grim estimate of the unprecedented crisis facing the CPC. Zhengming reports are at times unreliable, but I don't think this was based on mere hearsay evidence. Part of the evidence was that after the plenary session, the CPC carried out unprecedented emergency training of Party secretaries from thousands of counties convened at the National Central Party School. Jingji guancha bao [Economic Observer] reported on 1 December that an important content in the training for county party secretaries was how to deal with emergencies like that in Weng'an. This showed that Hu's secret report was not scare talk, but an emergency mobilisation order to the whole party, to deal with an unprecedented crisis. So what did Hu Jintao actually say? Zhengming magazine revealed that Hu's secret report cited eighteen major political, economic and social problems in China.