In the wake of Ai Weiwei's arrest, the Chinese government is now cracking down on another cultural figure: Confucius. A 31-foot bronze statue of the ancient robed thinker that was placed in Tiananmen Square in January — across from a giant portrait of Mao Zedong at the square's other end — was removed yesterday under mysterious circumstances.

The statue stood in front of the huge new National Museum of China, which has been the subject of criticism in the West for its whitewashing of Chinese history. Now, the sculpture of the 2,500-year-old theorist has been moved to an inner courtyard within the museum complex where it will be less visible, AFP reports. Other accounts are less certain of the statue's whereabouts, with the Global Times quoting two anonymous museum guards who were unaware where it had been taken.

No Chinese museum or government officials have spoken to the press on the record. According to Reuters, numerous calls to the museum remain unanswered, and the Global Times quoted a Tiananmen administrative committee employee who said, speaking anonymously, that the statue's disappearance "cannot be explained for the time being."

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Under Mao, Confucius was a banned figure, since the Communist leader
saw his philosophy of harmony and submission to family and duty as dangerous remnants of China's feudal past. Now, on the home page of the hardline Communist Web site maoflag.net, the character for "demolish" has been scrawled on an image of the statue. A maoflag.net user named Jiangxi Li Jianjun exulted that "the statue of the slave-owning sorcerer Confucius has been driven from Tiananmen Square!" Yet the statue's removal is a surprising turn-around, since the Chinese government has recently rehabilitated Confucius and used him as the public face of its Confucius Institutes for Chinese language and culture, which have proliferated around the globe, spreading to over 80 countries.

The statue's disappearance has sparked heated reactions online, with a user of sina.com's popular microblog making an oblique reference to accusations against Ai Weiwei by wondering "maybe Confucius has been taken away by police for suspected economic crimes?" One sina.com user offered this chilling interpretation of the news: "they can't count on Confucius, [they] still have to count on old Mao because you can't control people through thought, only through guns."