The flipped out travelers video is on Yahoo this morning. Going to make it more difficult to to sweep this under the rug. hehe Now i suppose soon will not be able to access yahoo without vpn.

Actually, it was already in the UK media yesterday (Feb 26).

There is a real problem here.
The Chinese view the reports and think, 'Government...privelage...etc.'
The rest of the world view the report and think, 'China... adjective... adjective'

The gentleman is a coal mining 'executive/entrepreneur.' I have come across quite a dozen of those in the course my work. In China, you have to have connections in both the govt and the underworld to keep the operation going, especially in coal mining which is a typical harsh industry. Read, he would have to have political clout to twist the arms of EPA... govt agencies etc, and manages the labour with the mafia. So sweeping under the rug is a good possibility, the lack of transparency is an insurance. :-)

The police and the guards are different. MOST of the uniformed guards are just that - unskilled labor in uniforms AND they're neither trained, nor required to do particularly anything - think of a stick of wood or a rock (or clump of dirt).

The police are usually the armed police - professional. Their job is cracking the infinitely many petty and serious crimes in the city - it's a <expletive> job and managing the infinitely many unskilled laborers in uniforms masquerading as police - giving them a generally bad reputation (police alleged relationships with gangster groups notwithstanding).

In reality - this is merely an opportunity to provide training to unskilled uniformed labor on how to respond to such situations - which usually involved rapid escalation to the professional police.

However, the police already know what's going on - as the other unskilled uniforms were watching everything on recorded video (and probably were also slow if not negligent to escalate).

Administerium - alive and well in Kunming.