China bids farewell to former premier Zhu Rongji, grapples with his legacy
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The Chinese flag at Tiananmen Square flying at half-mast on Aug 18 as part of mourning for the late former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji.
PHOTO: REUTERS
- China lowered flags and tightened security in Beijing to mourn former premier Zhu Rongji, who died at 97 and was cremated on August 18.
- Zhu led major economic reforms in the 1990s, curbing inflation, reforming state sectors, and helping China join the WTO in 2001.
- Public grief was tightly managed due to fears of unrest, but many expressed nostalgia for Zhu's era and his role in China's rapid growth.
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BEIJING – China consigned the body of former premier Zhu Rongji to the flames on Aug 18 and lowered the national flag to mourn the no-nonsense reformer who died last week at the age of 97, as citizens recalled a bygone era and reflected on his complicated legacy.
Security was tightened across the city, particularly around Tiananmen Square and the leaders’ enclave of Zhongnanhai, the centre of China’s political power, which lie on the route to the Babaoshan crematorium.
President Xi Jinping and the other six members of the Politburo standing committee stood in silence and made three bows before Zhu was cremated at the Beijing cemetery for top officials and national heroes, the official news agency Xinhua said.
Former president Hu Jintao, 83, who has missed a string of recent public events, sent a wreath of condolence for the former second-ranking official, it added.
A complex legacy
A vice-premier from 1991 to 1998 and premier from 1998 to 2003, Zhu helped drive the country’s hard-edged economic overhaul in the 1990s.
He curbed runaway inflation, tightened tax and banking systems and pushed through a sweeping state-sector shake-up that cost millions of jobs at unprofitable state companies.
The reforms also helped clear the way for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, foreshadowing integration into the global economy.
“My defining trait – my guiding principle – is independent thinking,” Zhu told officials in Shanghai in 1988 before he became the city’s mayor. “I believe I should say what I truly think.”
Zhu’s membership of the ruling Communist Party was revoked in the late 1950s for an incautious three-minute speech, he said.
It was not restored for roughly two decades.
When a four-volume selection of his speeches came out in 2011, readers were shocked by his description of “tofu dregs”, a term he coined for shoddily built flood dykes that he said were constructed by “parasites”, highlighting widespread corruption. He labelled erring bankers as “halfwits”.
His death brought an outpouring of mourning on Chinese social media, but a few welcomed his passing.
“As the child of laid-off workers, I’ll have to raise a glass tonight,” said a post later removed from Weibo, China’s version of X, after news of his death.
Another called Zhu “the main culprit” for putting workers out of work, but others defended the former premier.
“I know that quite a considerable number of ordinary people in China like me,” Zhu said in 2001.
“But there are also some who hate me to the core. How could one possibly make everyone love him?”
Managed grief
Like other former premiers who have died in the last decade, Zhu’s death was treated in a subdued and tightly managed manner, with public expressions of grief unfolding under heightened security, scrutiny and censorship.
A motorcade, believed to be carrying the body of former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, driving towards Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing on Aug 18.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Chinese authorities have long seen the deaths of popular former leaders as a potential trigger for a surge of public emotion, and an occasional catalyst for instability when remembrance of the dead turns into criticism of those in power.
Tens of thousands thronged Tiananmen Square and its surrounding streets in Beijing in 1976, after the death of Zhou Enlai, the People’s Republic of China’s first and widely respected premier.
Their mourning became a protest against the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and radical officials associated with it.
In 1989, the death of former party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was widely seen as sympathetic to political reform, prompted pro-democracy demonstrations that culminated in a bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square.
But greater scrutiny has not stemmed the flow of memories of Zhu.
“People are still quite nostalgic for him... and some seemed genuinely moved and almost tearful,” said Zhao, a 39-year-old information technology worker who gave only his surname.
The death took people back to how they felt 20 years ago, he added, soon after China began its reform and opening up to the world, with the economy growing rapidly. REUTERS
