Chinese see seismic change in their premier

The earthquake in south-east China may very well be remembered for something apart from tragedy. In amongst the rubble and corpses, a bespectacled 66-year-old man climbed into a collapsed building and called out, "This is Grandpa Wen, hang on child, we will rescue you!"

'Grandpa Wen' is Premier Wen Jiabao, the second most powerful man in China, and his emotional performance has had the Chinese blogs and mass media swooning. Video footage and photos have shown the usually stoic Wen (right) in his shirt sleeves, screaming orders into a mobile phone. When he slipped and cut his arm open, he pushed away the medics.

To say that his performance was a departure for a Chinese politician would not do justice to the suffocating protocol of Chinese politics. After the 'cult of personality' of the late Mao era, Chinese political consensus ruled that politicians should never again be allowed

to barter for political advantage using the affection of normal Chinese people. As a result modern Chinese politics relies on politicians being as unknowable to normal Chinese citizens as possible. President Hu Jintao allegedly prides himself on his inscrutability.

Wen's display of humanity can be partially explained by the fact he was born in Tianjin - the site of the last major Chinese earthquake in 1976 which killed hundreds of thousands of people. He was also trained as a geologist, making earthquakes something of a personal matter for him.

It's easy to be cynical about politicians using tragedies for political expediency. Think Rudy Giuliani after 9/11. Wen's own 'ground-zero' moment, however, deserves to be seen, if not as a shift in the Chinese political zeitgeist, then as a rare glimpse of empathy from the heart of the Communist Party political machine.