Web wiped of evidence Hu Jintao visited home town
Former president Hu Jintao paid a secret visit to his home town Taizhou in eastern Jiangsu province recently. The trip was so low profile that the only report about it was by a local social media user.
A photo posted by Weibo user “Taizhou Tongchenghui” yesterday morning showed a smiling Hu waving from a van with tinted windows. Behind it was a crowd of onlookers, some taking snapshots with their phones.
The post did not say when the photo was taken.
Posted along with the photo was information about Hu’s background and family. The photo and the article were removed shortly after being uploaded.
The last time Hu visited Taizhou, a city on the north bank of the Yangtze river established over 2,000 years ago, was in January 2013 – two months before he stepped down to make way for his successor Xi Jinping.
During that trip, state media went into great detail about the places he visited and even conversations he had with locals.
Beijing-based political analyst and historian Zhang Lifan said there are rules regarding public appearances by former leaders.
“There are internal restrictions on when and where they can show their faces. For example, they can’t all show up at the same time,” he said.
The last time Hu appeared in public was last September. He joined officials in Tiananmen Square for a lavish military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war.
Qiao Mu, a communications professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said Hu’s low-key visit was in line with media policies ushered in with Xi.
“Now everyone is talking about ‘toeing the line to Xi’ and ‘Xi core’. Under the current environment, the media won’t want to report much about leaders other than Xi, particularly former leaders,” Qiao said.
He said that it is a common practice for former leaders to keep a low profile after stepping down, leaving the media spotlight to current leaders. But there is one exception – Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin.
Jiang still lingered in the media spotlight after he stepped down as the president in 2002, staging high-profile public appearances from time to time.
Qiao pointed to the example when Jiang took a walk with family members on a Buddhist mountain in Hainan province in January 2015. The walk prompted much speculations among internet users and observers, who were quick to point out that the name of the mountain Jiang climed – Dongshan – means “staging a comeback” in Chinese.
Major Chinese news portals all carried reports about the walk, but the pages were all deleted later.
