Jiang Zemin Death: Jiang Zemin, 江泽民, Jiang Zemin Dead, Jiang Zemin Die, Jiang Zemin Died

As China’s top Communists gathered Friday morning on the stage beneath a giant hammer and sickle in the Great Hall of the People there was one very conspicuous absentee.

Former Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin (pictured) has been present at almost all major ceremonial events since he handed the country’s reins to his successor, Hu Jintao, in 2003.

The Communist Party of China celebrated the 90th anniversary of its founding on Friday and the celebrations in the Great Hall in central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were attended by 6,000 of the country’s nomenklatura.

But despite the attendance of many other senior cadres from Jiang’s administration, including former Premiers Zhu Rongji and Li Peng, the former commander-in-chief was nowhere to be found.

Unconfirmed Hong Kong media reports have suggested in recent months that Jiang, 84, has been hit by a serious illness that has left him incapacitated or at least unable to appear in public.

The health of senior serving or retired Chinese officials is usually considered a state secret and off-limits for tightly controlled Chinese media but in most cases the death of a top leader or former leader is announced within one or two days.

In 2009, Jiang stood next to President Hu on the rostrum overlooking Tiananmen Square as the People’s Republic of China celebrated its 60th birthday with a huge military parade.

In December last year, Jiang did not attend the funeral of former Chinese foreign minister Huang Hua, prompting tea-leaf reading political analysts and the Beijing gossip mill to speculate that he was too sick to appear in public.

Jiang was appointed to China’s top political posts in 1989 in the midst of the Tiananmen demonstrations and subsequent brutal crackdown.

More than a decade later he oversaw the first ever orderly transition of power in the history of the PRC when he stepped down in favour of Hu, although he retained enormous power within the Party, government and military and was still consulted on many issues until very recently.