This of course is not the Wukan most readers will recognise. On September 13, the day after the above details were reported prominently in Nanfang Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Party leadership in Guangdong province — right beside an interview in which the mayor of the city of Shanwei said the village’s land dispute had been resolved — the village erupted into open conflict.

Viewers across the world watched as online video showed tight formations of armed police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at villagers, who fought back with rocks and bricks. These police were presumably the same Frontier Defence Corps “soldiers” who two days earlier had swept the village’s streets and talked about building a “peaceful, harmonious, civilised and beautiful Wukan.”

The story about the Frontier Defence Corps doing clean up work in Wukan village on September 11 appears in the digital version of Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily on September 12.

In retrospect, the Nanfang Daily story — reprised elsewhere, including the tabloid Southern Metropolis Daily — seems a cynical and perverse ploy. Consider, for example, that around 3AM on September 13, the morning after the appearance of the aforementioned story, police conducted surprise raids on village homes, rounding up those suspected of organising fresh protests over dirty land deals. And then listen to Wu Jianjun, chief of the Frontier Defence Corps in the city of Lufeng, quoted in the harmonious Nanfang Daily story: “Our task today is mostly to do a major dragnet clean of Golden Harbour Avenue and New China East Street. Then we need to disinfect the flower plots, sewers, garbage cans and other key areas, ridding them of rodents.”

As we look back on the late night raids, and on the mass deployment of armed police witnessed later in the day on September 13, the phrase “major dragnet clean” becomes darkly poetic.

Home footage taken by Wukan villagers on September 13 of armed police conducting a late night raid and making an arrest.

Who was responsible for this psalm on the sacred relationship between armed police and villagers in Wukan? Was it, perhaps, a reporter from the provincial Nanfang Daily, visiting the village to witness personally the changes that had, according to the article, brought so much “positive energy” to the community? Was it a reporter for China’s official Xinhua News Agency, the wire service that routinely issues the first and final word on sensitive topics and breaking stories?

The byline on the story at Nanfang Daily is Li Qiang (李强), a bonafide reporter for the newspaper whose bylines regularly appear there. But beside Li Qiang is another name, “special correspondent” Chen Siying (陈思映). In the Chinese media, “special correspondent” is almost uniformly code for the person from a company or agency who supplied copy to the newspaper. Generally, the reporter from the newspaper — though “reporter” is in such cases a charitable title — files the copy with little or no change and adds their own name beside that of the “special correspondent,” without any mention of the latter’s affiliation. In many cases, the exchange also involves payment of the red envelope sort.

This photo included in a Legal Daily website report in June 2016 is credited to Chen Yiwu, a member of the Frontier Defence Corps who took photos in the village of Wukan this month.

Chen Siying isn’t difficult to find. A simple search throws up scores of “special correspondent” results over the past few years, all dealing with law enforcement conducted by the Frontier Defence Corps in the Shanwei jurisdiction, which covers both Lufeng and Wukan village. Chen shares bylines and photo credits in many different media, as for example in this report from the Legal Daily website back in June, which includes credit for a photo taken after police confiscated more than 700 kilograms of drugs.

In the version of Chen Siying’s report from Wukan appearing in the digital edition of the Southern Metropolis Daily on September 12, a black-and-white photo of members of the armed police clearing away shrubs and trees is credited to Chen Yiwu (陈奕武), who also happens to have a photo in the above-mentioned Legal Daily story. Chen Yiwu too is credited in numerous stories dealing with the work of the Frontier Defence Corps, especially in Shanwei and Lufeng. Here, for example, is a story from November 2015 in which he profiles members of Frontier Defence Corps’ anti-drug squad in Shanwei. Both of these “special correspondents” seem to be intimate chroniclers of the work, life and personalities of the armed police in Shanwei.

Which is to say, both the writer and the photographer behind the Nanfang Daily feature on the cordial relations between armed police and villagers in Wukan are members of the Frontier Defence Corps — the very same group we saw firing tear gas and dragging away villagers in those online videos shared right across the world.

And what about the article appearing right next to Chen Siying’s report on September 12, the interview with the mayor of Shanwei, Yang Xusong (杨绪松)? This article, in which Yang says that land issues in Wukan have “already been resolved in accordance with laws and regulations,” is also bylined by Li Qiang, the Nanfang Daily reporter. In this case, however, no “special correspondent” is credited, and it appears that the Nanfang Daily, the official organ of the provincial Party leadership, assigned its reporter to do this interview.

Side by side, this pair of articles suggests two important things. First of all, it appears that there was strong vertical coordination in Guangdong over the issue of Wukan, with endorsement through the provincial newspaper of the approach taken by the Shanwei leadership. Second, it appears that authorities at the city level were given a free rein not just in handling unfolding events in Wukan but also in doling out the facts.

This second point is an especially interesting one in light of the larger politics under President Xi Jinping. Within the sphere of China observation, we often talk about Xi the “strongman” consolidating his grip, Xi “as the core,” or Xi as the COE, the “chairman of everything.” Xi’s centralising grip on the media, which must all be “surnamed Party,” is a crucial part of this consolidation. And yet it seems, in the case of Wukan, that local leaders are being empowered to conduct “public opinion warfare,” to borrow a phrase from the most recent commentary from the editor-in-chief of the Global Times.

Could it be that control of information on sensitive and sudden-breaking news stories is devolving to local authorities under Xi? If that is the case, this would have serious ramifications for his stated objective of combatting corruption, effectively giving officials in places like Shanwei an ace card in covering up malfeasance.