“FEELING UNWELL”
China’s only comment came in a pair of tweets in English late on Saturday by its official Xinhua news agency saying that Hu had been feeling unwell, an explanation that has been met with scepticism by some China-watchers.
Twitter is blocked in China, and there has been no mention of the incident in domestic media.
State TV’s Saturday night news broadcasts included images of Hu at the congress, before his exit.
Asked at a regular news conference on Monday about the incident and the global attention it has gained, China’s foreign ministry referred to the Xinhua tweets.
China’s State Council Information Office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
“This episode probably tells us much more about China’s information environment than it does about any power struggles within elite Chinese politics,” said Benjamin Herscovitch, a research fellow at the Australian National University.
Chinese politics, always opaque, have become even more secretive under Xi’s decade-long tenure.
“Despite the plausibility of a mundane explanation of ill-health, the CCP’s secretiveness vis-a-vis senior Chinese leaders and elite Chinese politics lends itself to many more salacious explanations,” he said.
On China’s Twitter-like Weibo, a few social media users alluded to the incident by commenting on old posts featuring Hu. By Saturday night, the comments sections of almost all Weibo posts with Hu’s name were no longer visible.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Victor Shih, associate professor at the University of California, San Diego. “Obviously, the timing is a bit suspicious.”