protest - Two more crackdowns in China

As regular readers of this weblog know, I suffer from a kind of reversed Pavlov-reactions when the word 'crackdown' is being used in articles about China. Yes, when de China Digital Times signalled two major pieces on a recent crackdown in China, I was still a bit worried I might have missed something. Both David J. Lynch and Willy Wo Lap Lam signalled the country was yes again suffering from the heavy hand of their president.
In both cases, yet again, I found the qualification 'crackdown' very much a concept that reflected more the state-of-mind of both gentlemen than reality. In USA Today Lynch noted a crackdown on domestic dissent based on the arrest of New York Times assistant Zhao Yan, a registration campaign of websites and a comment on developments in Uzbekistan. While especially the arrest of Zhao Yan is worrying enough, with that quality of argumentation it would be even easier to prove that the USA has already matched Hitler's regime in cruelty. Just picking a few incidents and assuming a trend that is valid for the whole country is a very easy way to produce a juicy article.
When Willy Wo Lap Lam used in his article for the Jamestown Foundation one of his famous sentences ("Beijing sources close to the security apparatus said") I found it very hard to even countinue reading. Based on equally flimsy proof he entertained us in the 1990s - mostly in the South China Morning Post - with similar conspiracies that were a good read but were mostly way out of line with reality. While he uses the arrest of the academics Lu Jianhua and Chen Hui as a proof for the crackdown, it is slightly confusing Lu is also presented as a firm supporter of the current leadership. Pretty hard to construct a decent straightforward crackdown in China.