Beijing’s all-powerful online censorship machine roared into full crackdown mode today in an effort to prevent tens of millions of Chinese internet users discussing the possibility that their former president, Jiang Zemin, was at death’s door.
The 84-year-old, whose health has been the subject of passing speculation for some months, failed to appear along other members of the retired ruling elite at last Friday’s celebrations of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party.
Although Mr Jiang has not been seen in public since 2009, his non-appearance at a political event of that magnitude was more than enough to convince many people – especially in Hong Kong – that one of China’s political heavyweights had died. When the former car factory worker took the reins of power in China, the post-Tiananmen Communist government was a figure of international revulsion; by his retirement in 2003, it was a member of the World Trade Organisation and the fastest-growing economy in the world.
Despite his retirement, Mr Jiang has remained a figure of considerable importance within the Party, retaining sufficient clout to influence current politics should he choose. Some observers believe that he is poised, health permitting, to play a role in influencing the personnel line-up in next year’s critical change of leadership. Others believe that the most significant of his power-plays are long behind him.
The information blackout, which was fierce even by China’s recent standards, included completely blocking Chinese users from accessing the Wikipedia entries on Mr Jiang and erasing the word “river” from the search engine of the country’s largest microblogging site because the word is the same written character as the former president’s surname.
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Other measures included blocking searches on both Mr Jiang’s former rank of General Secretary and the rumoured cause of his potential demise: myocardial infarction. In the Government’s apparent paranoia over losing control of newsflow, the word “death” has been banned as a search item on the twitter-style system used by 140 million people, as has the number 301, which is the number of the military hospital in Beijing where he is thought to be.
Even with the new constraints in place, however, China’s largest microblogging site continued to churn out a constant flow of gossip, including one school of thought that holds that Mr Jiang’s health is not in immediate jeopardy.
Rumours over the health of the former president, who led China from the immediate aftermath of the deadly 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown until 2003, began surfacing late last week. Speculation was especially frenetic in Hong Kong, where Mr Jiang is remembered as the president to whom the British had to cede their former colony.
With the gossip flying, mainstream Chinese media made a studied attempt to demonstrate that nothing of significance was happening. Newsreaders on the state broadcaster’s prime-time 7pm news were not dressed especially sombrely and there appeared to be no attempt to prepare the nation for mourning.