Under President Xi Jinping, China’s former leaders have grown accustomed to keeping their heads down.
But in an essay published this week, ostensibly a tribute to his late mother, former Premier Wen Jiabao appeared to issue what many have interpreted as a coded criticism of Xi: calling for fairness, justice, humanity and liberty, all while remembering a period of history the Communist Party would rather forget.
Wen’s words took Chinese social media by the storm. His essay was shared hundreds of thousands of times — before censors stepped in to stop people spreading it (yes, even the country’s second-highest official for a decade could not escape China’s increasingly stringent censorship).