when i visited china in 08 spring festival, saw a very detailed report on it by cctv2, it's almost like an american media. the report throughly went over the incident and different opinions by all sides. in generla it's quite an objective report.
and obviously xu is just a nobody, no mysterious bignames supporting him in dark.
of course there're still many needed to be improved about the treatment of this case, as discussed in above. but overall i'll call it's quite a progress.