On July 6, 2011, rumors about the death of Jiang Zemin, the ex chief of the Chinese Communist Party, became popular in China’s local searches, but within half an hour, the country stretched out the heavy hand of China’s censors to block Chinese language searches about Jiang’s death. If people search for words related to Jiang’s death, the search pages return a message saying: "According to relevant policies and laws, the search results are not shown below." A posting on Weibo stated, "About the news that Jiang Zemin has passed away, news organizations can’t do reports on their own, all news reports should be in accordance with news releases from Xinhua [the official state news agency]."
On July 7, the official Xinhua quoted "authoritative sources" in its report denying the rumor.
Source: AFP, July 8, 2011
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