Chinese authorities have blocked online access to an article published on the English-language and Chinese-language websites of The Wall Street Journal that describes how a top Chinese state banker’s commercial success hasn’t translated into promotion within the Communist Party.

The Journal had posted the English-language article about Jiang Jianqing, the longtime chairman of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., at about noon Tuesday in China. It posted the Chinese version of the article on its Chinese-language site about two hours later.

By 6 p.m. Tuesday in China, access to both the English- and Chinese-language versions of the article had been blocked. A post linking to the article on the Journal’s Sina Weibo microblog account was also blocked. A Sina spokesman said he didn’t have an immediate comment.

The article was published at a time when China’s new leaders are expected to make decisions on a number of top economic slots, including head of the central bank and ministers of Commerce and Finance. Mr. Jiang, which built ICBC into China's most profitable state-owned bank, was the only one of his peers at China’s top four banks to get passed over for promotion at a recent party congress. That badly damaged his chances of holding any of those plum positions, according to bank and Communist Party officials.