Black and White Cat

A whole lot of people must have been smoking too many fireworks during the Spring Festival holidays. Newspapers and TV stations all over the place have been chattering with great excitement about President Hu Jintao’s supposedly genuine People’s Daily microblog. (A few examples in Chinese; and some more in English).

In his profile, “Hu Jintao” describes himself as “General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, President of the State and Chairman of the Central Military Commission”. But he couldn’t find a photograph of himself and so far he hasn’t been able to think of anything to say.

OK. Right. So, in order to believe that this really was (it already seems to be in the past tense) Hu Jintao’s microblog, let’s just think about what else we have to believe. A man whose public appearances and utterances are all carefully stage-managed to ensure that nothing whatsoever can go wrong and the correct impression is always given has now decided to use this default picture as his avatar:

Compare that with Barack Obama’s Twitter page and ask yourself: is it likely that the leader of China, a country that takes appearances very, very seriously, will deliberately embarrass that country by representing himself as nerdy lightbulb? If that’s true, I’ll eat my cat.

The People’s Daily supposedly verified that Hu Jintao’s account was genuine. They can’t have verified it very well. Oh, and by the way, the account appears to have been deleted. Maybe President Hu finally broke his silence, but his first tweet was so illegal they closed him down. Or maybe he gave up trying to come up with a 150-character statement and decided microblogging is just too hard. Not all that likely.

(If I’m wrong about the account being deleted, let me know. My cat doesn’t know that his life is at stake.)

Update: The cat will be relieved to know that he will not be eaten today. It turns out that the People’s Daily Online had automatically generated microblog accounts for all of its Strong Country forum VIP guests, which included Hu Jintao. Hu’s Strong Country forum account had been set up for his brief, and rather boring, interaction with netizens one day in June 2008 which consisted of five comments. So the microblog was “real”, but not. And now it’s gone.