Liberal face cannot save the Chinese government from itself

The next day, censors silenced the news media's dogged reporting on railway negligence and corruption, then started censoring posts on blogs that had stoked outrage over the crash.

By last week, the government inquiry itself was accused of being rigged, as it is to be run by a panel that includes the Railways Ministry's second in command and loyalist experts.

Such indignities are not new. As Mr Wen enters the twilight of a decade as China's third-ranked leader, he appears to be struggling to remain relevant in a political system that needs his benevolent public image but has little use for his ideas.

The leading spokesman for what passes for political liberalism in China, Mr Wen is by most accounts ideologically isolated on the Communist Party's nine-member Politburo standing committee. More than once, his views have been rebuffed, tacitly or openly, in party organs. There are tantalising hints of rifts with his boss, president Hu Jintao.

"Grandpa Wen," who shares the common man's pain and champions his interests, is easily China's most popular politician. But internally, as Communist Party hard-liners strengthen their control, his advocacy of political reform has increasingly sapped his influence.

He has become such a high-risk figure, one official news media editor says, that a state radio network last year balked at his offer of an exclusive exchange with listeners on the air.

He Weifang, a liberal Beijing legal scholar, said: "When Wen became premier eight years ago, people had high hopes because his speeches always leave people hopeful. But now it has been eight years. His term is coming to an end.

"It's doubtful whether he genuinely has the strong will to reform, because it doesn't seem he has taken enough convincing actions to resist the conservatives."

But in a mostly faceless leadership, no-one strains so publicly at his tethers - or suffers as many rebuffs - as Mr Wen. That pattern has intensified as jockeying begins for next year's choice of a new politburo and the next generation of China's top leaders.

The Wenzhou episode is illustrative. One political analyst close to senior officials said Mr Wen had not planned to visit the disaster scene; a deputy prime minister who oversees work safety, Zhang Dejiang, was to handle the matter.

But with Mr Zhang in charge, excavators buried a wrecked train carriage at the site, provoking a national outcry from bloggers who accused the government of a cover-up. Mr Wen was sent to Wenzhou to soothe the masses.As he did after the train accident, Mr Wen stood in the rubble of the Sichuan Province earthquake in 2008 and promised a transparent investigation into the collapses of shoddily built schools that killed thousands of children.

The press reported that 2,500 investigators were deployed. But no wrongdoing was ever disclosed - instead, several activists who pursued the issue ended up in detention.

Chen Jianping, 23, a friend of two of Wenzhou train-crash survivors, said: "The government is unable to carry out everything it promises; some of what he says may be just show."

Cheng Li, a Brookings Institution scholar of the Chinese leadership, said: "The cynicism about the system is rising.

"My real worry is whether the next generation will have a Wen Jiabao-like leader."