China Media Project surveys the paltry coverage given to the death of Hua Guofeng, once the party leader:

“Former premier Hua Guofeng (华国锋), the party leader eventually outmaneured in the late 1970s by the more charismatic Deng Xiaoping (邓小平), passed away quietly last week. Hua was given scarcely a nod from international media, who were busy, understandably, covering the Games in Beijing.

The response from China’s media was understated too, with a few notable exceptions from more freewheeling commercial media.

In official party papers, Hua was inevitably given a small, namecard-sized treatment last Thursday in the front page space Chinese journalists refer to as the ‘paper’s rear-end’ (报屁股) — that is, usually, the lower right-hand corner. The text was uniformly the official Xinhua News Agency release:

Comrade Hua Guofeng, a distinguished Chinese Communist Party member, a tested and faithful champion of communism, who previously held important posts in the party and government, passed away on August 20, 2008, at 12:50pm in Beijing, due to an illness that did not respond to treatment. He was 87 years old.

Coverage at the official People’s Daily was typical, devoting a small box with a photo of Hua and the Xinhua release…”