Update | Online censorship rolled back on 25th anniversary of death of reformist leader

The Chinese government on Tuesday took a more tolerant stance to online censorship on the anniversary of the death of former Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, whose death 25 years ago today helped spark the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.

Messages of remembrance for the former Communist Party general secretary of the 1980s were widely circulated on China’s largest microblogging site, Weibo, a social media machine prone to blocking information deemed sensitive by the government.

China’s largest news portals separately rolled out modest coverage of the remembrance of the political figure long regarded as a sensitive subject by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Photos of Hu accompanied by his protegés Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, who later become Chinese president and premier respectively and remained in office for a decade, were widely circulated on the internet. A collection of senior party officials’ past comments on Hu were posted on 163.com, one of the largest news portals in China.

Hu rose to power and assumed the position of general secretary of the Communist Party in the early 1980s. His efforts to encourage officials to make governance more transparent and to loosen economic controls won him the reputation as a pragmatic reformer.

But he was forced to resign amid growing pressure by conservatives within the party in 1987. His death two years later sparked events that lead to the Tiananmen Square protests and the subsequent bloody crackdown by Chinese authorities.