Chinese President Xi Jinping’s tightening web of controls and censorship has not spared even former premier Wen Jiabao. He had written an essay paying tribute to his mother in an obscure paper, the Macao Herald. It was posted on his official WeChat account but days later viewers found they could not share it within their network.
WeChat had a cryptic explanation: “This article violates WeChat’s terms of operation.”
It turns out that in Xi Jinping’s paranoid totalitarian regime, references to the Cultural Revolution are routinely censored. Wen had referred to the horrors inflicted on his family during that decade including “constant attacks in successive political campaigns”. He wrote about “respect for the human heart, humanity and human nature” and the “temperament of youth freedom and struggle.” That was enough to set the wheels of censorship moving.
