"Murder of meteorologist may have been a contract killing" ran a headline recently in the Hong Kong Standard on the Internet. The report went on to describe the fate of Zou Jingmeng as he unlocked his car outside a hotel in the Chinese capital, Beijing. Four stab wounds were allegedly inflicted by three people "about 27 or 28 years old, who immediately fled in a red car without removing anything from their dying victim".
Now Zou was no ordinary meteorologist. For one thing he was the adopted son of the first premier of modern China, Chou Enlai; he was also a brother of the former deputy prime minister, Zou Jiahua, who is now vice-president of the National People's Congress, and he was himself a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Perhaps in one or all of these connections lies the key to his assassination. It was surely not because he was a weatherman?
Zou was born in Shanghai in February 1929. His meteorological career began in 1944, when at the age of 15 he became a weather observer in the service of Mao Tse-tung's advancing armies, as they encroached inexorably on the territory formerly under the control of the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. After the upheaval, Zou went on to graduate from university in meteorology, and occupied many senior positions in the China Meteorological Agency before being appointed "honourable administrator", or as we would say, director, in 1982. There he served until his retirement from active meteorology in 1996.
Zou was very successful at his job. He availed of the opportunities provided by the opening up of China in recent years to explore ways of modernising meteorology in that country. He was also very active on the international scene, and received the supreme accolade in 1987 of being elected president of the World Meteorological Organisation, the highest position ever held by a Chinese person in the United Nations system of specialised agencies. During his tenure of this office I had the personal privilege of attending several of the meetings he chaired.
No doubt here, on the other side of the world, we will never know why Zou Jingmeng was killed. But it is hard not to think of Act II of Julius Caesar, where Mark Anthony holds up the ragged cloak of the departed statesman:
Look, in this place ran Cassius's dagger through;
See, what a rent the envious Casca made;
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed . . .
of which he says a little further on:
And this was the most unkindest cut of all.