Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people gathered yesterday near a state funeral home in Beijing as former Chinese premier Li Keqiang (李克強) was put to rest, while a steady stream of mourners showed their respects at Li’s childhood home in central China.
Li, who was China’s top economic official for a decade, died on Friday last week of a heart attack at age 68.
“The remains of Comrade Li Keqiang ... were cremated at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing on Thursday,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Photo: AP
State broadcaster CCTV showed Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) accompanied by his wife, Peng Liyuan (彭麗媛), bowing before Li’s body, which was surrounded by greenery and covered with a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) flag.
Xi was followed by the other six members of the all-powerful CCP Politburo Standing Committee.
“Li was extolled as an excellent [CCP] member, a time-tested and loyal Communist soldier and an outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the party and the state,” Xinhua said, repeating the language it had used earlier in his brief obituary.
Li was an advocate of private business who promised market-oriented reforms, and helped navigate the world’s second-largest economy through challenges such as rising tensions with the US and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, he was left with little authority after Xi made himself the most powerful Chinese leader in decades by eliminating presidential term limits and tightening control over the economy and society.
In front of the funeral home, plainclothes and uniformed police lined the roadway for hundreds of meters, blocking traffic and telling people to move along. Police also moved people away from a subway station near the cemetery, where state funerals are held and many top leaders are buried.
A forest of phone cameras rose as the cortege consisting of several buses passed by.
Large crowds also gathered in Li’s hometown of Hefei in the central province of Anhui, where a steady stream of people, some wearing black, were permitted to walk down Hongxing Road to lay small bouquets of white and yellow chrysanthemums and pay their respects in front of the three-story house where Li spent his childhood.
The scene was similar to that immediately after Li’s death was announced, when the line ran for 10km and residents waited up to five hours to present flowers, Anhui native Liu Xiaoqiang said.
That was viewed by some as a protest against Li’s political sidelining by authoritarian Xi.
Such spontaneous gatherings are almost never permitted in China, but the authorities appeared to be taking a relatively light approach, possibly to avoid sparking a larger incident.
However, Associated Press journalists in Hefei were shadowed by unidentified people who monitored their interviews and in some cases tried to record them.
“The death was so sudden and we came here to see him off,” Hefei resident Liu Ying said.
Liu brought her seven-year-old son and planned to meet with a friend who was bringing her daughter so they could lay flowers together.
She said her son only vaguely knew who Li was.
“He does not understand now but he will when he grows up,” she said.
Another woman said she and two friends dressed in black traveled on Wednesday from the neighboring Jiangsu Province and had laid bouquets three times.
The woman described Li as “a good premier loved by the people.”
Li was dropped from the CCP Politburo Standing Committee in October last year. He left office in March, despite being two years below the informal retirement age of 70.
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