News of Assassination Attempt on Chinese Leader Uncensored

At around 7:00 a.m. on May 1, a Chinese blogger found news on Baidu.com about the attempted assassination of Chinese leader Hu Jintao in 2006. Baidu is the largest search engine in China.

NTD Television confirmed that when using keywords like “assassinate Hu on the North Sea Fleet,” “assassinate Hu at the Yellow Sea,” and “Zhang Dingfa assassinates Hu,” on the search engine, there are links to several websites and some of them provide relatively detailed descriptions of the incident. NTD Television also found that “Hu assassination” was not censored on Sina’s Weibo.com.

The story, as told by Hong Kong’s Trend Magazine, goes like this:

In May 2006 Hu secretly visited a navy base in Qingdao, Shandong Province. He boarded the most advanced guided-missile destroyer to inspect the fleets on the Yellow Sea. Suddenly two fleets simultaneously fired at the destroyer. The destroyer immediately turned around and fled…