Chinese censors laboured in vain yesterday as citizens messaged each other about the one topic on everyone’s mind: the fate of Bo Xilai, the purged party boss, and his wife.
The day after state media announced Mr Bo had been stripped of his party posts and his wife, Gu Kailai, was a suspect in the alleged murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, Twitter-like microblog sites blocked searches for the country’s most famous couple. But the country’s 500m-odd netizens debated the political drama anyway using pictures, code-words and vague comments about power and corruption.
“Pathetic! How ignorant that such a high leader gets himself into such a mess,” wrote Sun Xiangbo in a thread attached to a picture of Bo Xilai. Hung Huang, the daughter of Mao Zedong’s English teacher and a prominent publisher and blogger, wondered whether “in this country, when a man does something bad, it’s all the woman’s fault”.