Hua died on August 20, and as you can expect w/ someone of his particular stature and role in history, obituaries are going to be terse at best:
On Baidu news, the Olympics coverage dominated most of the top of the web page, and you had to scroll down slightly to get to a few sparse links, as you can see from the image below:

百度新闻搜索——全球最大的中文新闻平台 via kwout

Not that many articles went in depth into who Hua was or what he did, and none of them really were obituaries except perhaps this one. Most of them were, like this one, made note of his passing and threw a timeline of his career in there, which is nice as a reference though totally useless in terms of explaining to the uninitiated what this guy was all about.

THe news of the Communist Party of China website had the following article:

人物春秋：粉碎“四人帮”后的华国锋–中国共产党新闻–中国共产党新闻网 via kwout

This article talks about Hua’s career, mostly with regards to his role in the “smashing of the Gang of Four,” duly noted as a positive political accomplishment, whereas his “two whatevers” policy, based on the unabashed obeisance to the gospel of the Chairman, was considered, in hindsight, to be a political “error.”

I can’t help but smirk a bit at reading the translation of 两个凡是 as the “two whatevers” because whenever I hear the word “whatevers” I hear some southern Californian moppet intoning the word with a roll of the eyes.

I’m going to keep track of what the Chinese media has to say about Hua, if anything, in the coming days and weeks.

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