When horror hits China, the first instinct is shut it down
bbc.com
bbc.com
Similarly, I suspect that people calling the PRC "unstable" ranks higher on their censorship priorities than people calling it "evil."
Disclosure: Former Hong Kong gwailo resident.
If it's all honest and aboveboard, they wouldn't need to stir up a mob of locals or hidden security guards. They could just use actual laws with uniformed police and a paper-trail.
If it's foreign reporters, why are they so worried about copycats? Are they attacking BBC reporters "for their own good" to stop copycat attacks in Britain?
The article doesn't imply that PRC Politicians "used" mob violence. Reporters arrived at a crime scene, were questioned by security guards, and were later harried (though hardly assaulted) by a pack of local thugs. Such events happen all the time, in every part of the world.
Though we needn't go there, in any case the answer to your question is: Plain common sense. What's reported in the West will eventually be discoverable from within China, and they simply don't want this event or its circumstances to be reported. Not in China, and not outside it, for straightforward domestic policy reasons. Mass murderers in the West are often lionized and become celebrities or pop culture figures -- see, e.g., Klebold and Harris, Breivik, etc. -- and China evidently wants to nip that sort of thing in the bud. This is not unwise.
It doesn't "imply" the phenomenon because it says so explicitly, along with an example from Premier Li Keqiang's death in 2023.
> This is not unwise.
Even with the most-charitable interpretation of Chinese politicians' personal motivations, you continue to confuse the means and the ends.
Permitting violence without accountability is unwise. Creating secret and arbitrary rules is unwise.
You have an ideal of press freedom.
They have an ideal of a harmonious society.
In certain edge cases, the two are evidently not compatible. Here you suppose that they should prioritize press freedom. They, however, believe that promoting societal harmony takes priority. (By this I mean a press blackout, no lionization of the perpetrator, no "manifesto," no public investigation of the motive for the crime -- for indeed no motive could justify it -- and basically none of the circus that you'd see in the West following such an event.)
So. Even if the rules are unclear, or if there's no time for official rulemaking, they exercise sovereign power to attain their preferred end state.
You call this unwise? I think that it's an excellent example of real, old-fashioned sovereignty: The ability to transcend the written law and make exceptions if the sovereign believes that they serve the public good. Besides, any professional journalist has probably figured all of this out a long time ago, and makes an effort to work within the paradigm.