A Deafening Silence About Chen in China BEJING - If you woke up in China on Sunday you were likely still in the dark when it came to the arrival of Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal advocate, in the United States. The rest of the world followed Mr. Chen's departure from Beijing and arrival in New York, but microblogs, online sites and traditional media here focused instead on a victory by Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang at the men's 110-meter race in Shanghai's Diamond League on Saturday. Over 8 million posts on Sina's Weibo, or microblog, site, celebrating Mr. Liu's success. Mr. Liu beat Jason Richardson, the U.S. and world champion, winning the race in 12.97 seconds, the Beijing News reported. On Sunday morning, the popular news aggregation websites QQ.com and Sina.com highlighted a massive explosion in a tunnel in Hunan province that killed 20 people, reportedly caused by 288 kilos of dynamite. The top news story on Sina.com was an angry rebuttal by China's Foreign Ministry of a Pentagon report that said China was aggressively modernizing its military. The source of Sina.com's report was the Beijing News, which ran a banner headline, above a photograph of a celebrating Mr. Liu, saying: "China opposes the American report on China's military." The story quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei saying the report was "irresponsible" and that China had protested to the U.S. A search for Mr. Chen's full name on Sina's Weibo, or microblog, failed to show posts. News of him has been largely blocked for weeks and his departure didn't change that. In a rare post on Weibo, Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, an often-aggressively nationalist newspaper, referred to Mr. Chen only by his last name, saying: "Today, Chen and his family have already taken an American airplane to New York. It makes people feel regret and sigh that in China today this is the only way to solve his problem. Mr. Hu said people should understand the complexity of China and called on officials to feel a "sense of urgency" to reform and improve handling of incidents in order to avoid similar problems in the future. By noon in Beijing, the post had been forwarded about 5,000 times. Shortly before Mr. Chen's departure, Xinhua, the state news agency, issued a one-line announcement he had applied to study abroad "via normal channels," Reuters reported, but since his name was not searchable on Sunday morning on Xinhua's news Website, it's unclear who would have seen it. On its English website, Xinhua headlined a message from former President Jiang Zemin on the 100th anniversary of nine universities in Jiangsu province: The silence about Mr. Chen spoke volumes - but so did this: on CCTV, China's lead broadcaster, a weekly news show anchored by the popular Bai Yansong, featured a long report on offensive behavior by foreigners in China. It showed video of an apparent assault by a British tourist on a Chinese woman, and the tourist's subsequent beating at the hands of passersby, in an incident that has caused a storm of controversy and led to online calls to throw out "foreign trash." My colleague David Goodman wrote about the campaign over on The Lede blog. Yang Rui, a well-known host on CCTV's English channel, deepened the controversy last week when he apparently posted this on his Weibo account: "People who can't find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration," The Atlantic reported. Police in Beijing last week launched a 100-day campaign to "clean out" foreigners who break immigration, residency or work rules, setting up a special telephone hotline for Beijingers to report suspects. The campaign, which a police notice said was targeted at "Three No" foreigners (those who break immigration, residency or work rules) is accompanied by an image of a clenched fist, which can be viewed on the Beijing police's microblog site.