The facts, I think, speak for themselves. I'll just list them here:

1. The city of Linyi has administrative oversight of the village of Dongshigu.

2. The village of Dongshigu is where blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng is currently being held under extra-judicial house arrest. Those who try to visit him are often beaten by plainclothes guards who appear to act with impunity just down the road from a police checkpoint.

3. Chen Guangcheng was put under house arrest after his release from prison. He was sent to prison for 51 months after trying to organize a class action lawsuit against local officials whose adherence to China's one-child policy reportedly included forced abortions and sterilizations, often after the women in question had been dragged out of their homes.

4. Relativity Media, which is in a partnership that has a deal with a Chinese state distribution company, recently chose Linyi as a filming location for a movie titled "21 and Over." The movie was described in a company press release as being about two childhood friends "who drag their straight-arrow buddy out to celebrate his twenty-first birthday the night before an all-important medical school interview. But when one beer leads to another, the evening spirals into a wild epic misadventure of debauchery and mayhem that none of them will ever forget."

5. After a few days of issuing "No comment" statements to Western press, Relativity today released these three sentences:

"From its founding, Relativity Media has been a consistent and outspoken supporter of human rights and we would never knowingly do anything to undermine this commitment. We stand by that commitment and we are proud of our growing business relationships in China, through our partnership with Sky Land, its strategic alliance with Huaxia Film Distribution Company. As a company, we believe deeply that expanding trade and business ties with our counterparts in China and elsewhere can result in positive outcomes."

6. Relativity Media did not list what those positive outcomes might be. So far, they have not included freedom for Chen Guangcheng.

Hollywood Reporter has an item that caught me by ... surprise. Apparently, the U.S. film company Relativity Media is shooting part of a movie in Linyi under a partnership called Sky Land. 

This is the Linyi in Shandong Province. The same place where blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng is being held under extra-judicial house arrest in a local village. He was detained after being released from 51 months in prison -- the consequence of his trying to lead a class action lawsuit against area government campaign of forced sterilization and abortions. Chen and his wife were reportedly badly beaten at the behest ofofficials earlier this year.

The Hollywood Reporter story says that:

"The comedy is said to be about buddies who celebrate a 21st birthday with a night of 'debauchery and mayhem that none of them will ever forget' on the night before one of them has an important interview to get into medical school.

The youthful cast includes Miles Teller (Footloose), Justin Chon (The Twilight Saga),Skylar Astin (Taking Woodstock) and Sarah Wright (The House Bunny).

The script is by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, whose credits include The Hangover. They are also directing."

It goes on to add:

"Production commenced Oct. 26 in the city of Linyi, in the south of China's Shandong province.

The Chinese Communist Party Secretary of Linyi's Municipal Committee, Zhang Shajun, who ranks above the local mayor, issued a statement welcoming the production to his city and adding that he 'particularly welcome(s) my good friend (Relativity CEO) Ryan Kavanaugh and his great company" to his 'historic city,' adding: 'We promise to provide the best service possible in order to help make the movie successful worldwide.'

Tucker Tooley, Relativity's co-President said the Sky land partners love this 'hysterical film and it's gratifying they want to build a foundation immediately alongside our cast and crew. We are very much looking forward to shooting in China, especially in a place as amazing as Linyi.'"

 UPDATE: The press release from Relativity Media can be found by clicking here. And I became aware of this turn of events after reading a Twitter post by Phil Pan, who reported extensively about Chen Guangcheng's ordeal during his time as The Washington Post's Beijing Bureau Chief. He later expanded on that material in his excellent book, Out From Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China.

I travelled to Shandong Province last week to report on the story of Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer being held under extrajudicial house arrest. "House" is too narrow a term -- his entire village has been blocked off by plainclothes security.

On Thursday night, over dinner at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, I interviewed an activist named Wang Xuezhen.

Wang told me that the last time she'd tried to enter Chen's village, men put a bag put over her head and kicked her repeatedly. They also stole all of Wang's belongings.

She was headed to a police station the next morning to file a complaint and try to get her stuff back. I tagged along to see what would happen. At the station in Linyi,  a city that has administrative oversight of Chen's village, Wang watched a group of men outside with concern.

She spoke with a police officer -- "my cell phone was smashed by unidentified people" --  took the paperwork her gave her and then pulled out a cell phone to make some calls.

She dialed her husband, a fellow activist and then a Chinese journalist to let them know what was happening.

“I don’t want to be beaten, I just want to get my things back," Wang said into her cell phone. At the end of it, an officer asked her to come back the next week.

Wang did return this week, to another police station closer to Chen's village. Peter Foster, a journalist from The Telegraph, was there and described what happened in a report published today:

"The policeman’s hand slapped the woman’s face with an audible crack. Standing only five feet tall in her trainers, barely the height of her assailant’s epaulettes, she took the blow without a cry ... Stumbling out of the police station and holding her stinging face, Miss Wang bitterly observed a truth about contemporary China: the country’s lawlessness begins with the law itself."

Later in the article, Foster explains that:

"Ironically, Miss Wang and two others had paid a visit to the local police station to ask for protection from the thugs who – just like the officer who struck her and removed the Velcro patch with his police number on – operate above the law, but apparently with its tacit support.

Their request was met with scorn.

'You are citizens of China, of course you are free to visit the village,' said the senior officer, who would not give his name, but did wear his ID number, 076970. 'If there are problems we will protect you, but we cannot protect you against imaginary difficulties.'

It was then that Miss Wang started to argue, retorting that the last time she came to Dongshigu, on September 21, a bag was put over her head before she was beaten and robbed and yet the police offered her no protection and refused to investigate her case. After firing a particularly strong insult at the officer, that slap suddenly rang out. But what would be grounds for an assault charge in Britain was brushed off as just another unavoidable knock."

This morning, I read an interesting piece in the Global Times: Beijing is launching a free WiFi service in seven sections of the city that will provide Internet access with the simple entry of the user's cell phone number.

I noted that two of the areas, Xidan and Wangfujing, were areas where police cracked down earlier this year on foreign journalists who gathered to see if online calls for protests would result in actual protests. (They didn't.) I Tweeted the story, saved a copy for future reference and continued the day.

An hour later, I stopped at a Starbucks on the way to work for a coffee and to poke around some online research for a story I'm working on. Instead of the usual free WiFi offered at most cafes here, the store had an interface that looked a lot like what the Global Times story described -- a page to enter my cell phone number, which then generated a text message with a password. It's the same system that one uses at the airports here.

I started surfing around and all was well. I needed to go to a couple websites that I knew would be blocked by the Internet censorship program here, known as the Great Firewall, so I clicked on my Virtual Private Network program and carried on. Then my VPN connection faltered. I reconnected and continued. The VPN failed again. And then again. And ... again. I began to suspect something was up, so I switched from the WiFi to a 3G connection. Suddenly, I had no problems with my VPN. Now, sitting at my office, the VPN continues to work just fine.

All of this could of course be a glitch in the shop's WiFi connection, or my laptop just being moody. But after reading coverage yesterday about even more signals from the Chinese government that it intends to "strengthen management" of the Internet here (in what is already one of the world's most sophisticated censorship regimes), I wondered: Where is all of this headed, exactly? 

A measure of the opaque, and at times strange, nature of China and its politics: One is not always sure whether past national leaders are alive. Due to factional struggles within the Chinese Communist Party (or perceived struggles), the issues of former rulers, their health and their allies are closely watched and at times difficult to discern. This was the case with former president Jiang Zemin.

Online rumors began to circulate this summer that the 84-year-old Jiang had passed away. He did not show up for a celebration of the Communist Party's 90th anniversary. There were whispers of late night caravans of dark sedans pulling into state hospitals. State media denied the reports, and the issue drifted away after a while, though for some Chinese web users there was a lingering suspicion.

Sunday brought final confirmation that Jiang is, in fact, alive. He was in attendance for a celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the fall of the Qing Dynasty.

The Associated Press described him as: "Dressed in a dark blue suit and red tie, Jiang wore his signature large, square-rimmed glasses as he sat listening to speeches with his hands on the table in front of him. His hair was slicked back as usual but was obviously thinning, and he appeared at times to be tired."

Of course, this is about more than Jiang. It's yet another moment to consider the effects of China's authoritarian approach to information flow. After so many years of disinformation, a fact magnified now by expanding Internet usage and a Chinese press that at times pushes boundaries, Beijing's rulers are faced with a public increasingly reluctant to accept official versions of events. Even when they're true.