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Chinese Communist Party leaders publicly revered former Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday when he was buried, but censors erased praise for the reformist bureaucrat who was once considered a rival to Xi Jinping as president.
Li, an economist who speaks fluent English, was killed in an attack at a Shanghai center last week at the age of 68, just months after he stepped down as the country’s second-largest leader.
This low-key but affable technocrat was perceived by many as a proponent of political liberalization and economic reform, but was eventually marginalized due to Xi’s taste for more centralized and domineering rule.
As flags flew at half-staff across the country in tribute to what the Communist Party called a “loyal communist soldier,” the government was on high alert for any trace of public mourning for Li that would translate into a grievance toward Xi.
Social media site Weibo posted more than 30,000 comments on Thursday under a hashtag commemorating Li that was shared on state broadcaster CCTV.
But only thirteen of them were visible, suggesting that Chinese censors took a giant amount of comments from the site.
Those who stayed were clearly apolitical, bidding farewell to the former prime minister and vowing that “he will be in our hearts. “
Charlie Smith, co-founder of GreatFire, which oversees censorship in China, told AFP that “authorities are intensively following messages about Li’s death. “
He pointed to a series of censored comments subsidized through his group, adding one that hailed Li as a “fashionable guy with fashionable social concepts and a fashionable vision of civilization. “
Another praised Li for his paintings to “simplify” China’s bureaucracy.
“The government gives the impression that everyone is worried about Li’s death and that it is unimaginable to express any other sentiment,” said Smith, who writes under a pseudonym.
Sharper comments may be discovered on the old Weibo page of whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang, who died of Covid in early 2020 after the government silenced his efforts to warn others about the deadly disease, prompting a public outcry.
“All the flags across the country are at half-staff and there’s nothing we can do to bow and say goodbye,” one netizen wrote.
“They may not let us search for anything on the internet and rejecting it is unbearable,” wrote another.
During Li Keqiang’s ten-year rule, there was a more consensual regime shift from the former rulers to more Xi-style.
The reflected public image and nostalgia for the disappearance of former leaders can be very delicate for the Communist Party.
The death last year of former leader Jiang Zemin, at the height of anti-Covid lockdowns, triggered a wave of online nostalgia for his more relaxed and open rule in the 1990s.
And David Bandurski, director of the independent China Media Project, wrote that Li revered with a “paint-by-numbers treatment. “
“In his death, it turns out that Li Keqiang was also left out,” he said.
The appointment of a key best friend of Xi’s as Li Keqiang’s successor was seen as a sign that his reformist agenda had been abandoned as Beijing tightened its grip on the economy.
Social media users have shared some of Li Keqiang’s best-known quotes since his death, adding renewed aid to China’s reform and opening-up policy, made as the country groaned under Covid isolation restrictions in 2022.
“The Yellow River and the Yangtze River will replace their course,” Li said at the time, calling the reform procedure an unstoppable force of nature.
The Communist Party suggested that the Chinese people “turn their pain into strength” by further allying themselves with their leaders.
His body was cremated at Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Thursday at an event attended by the country’s most sensible leaders, Xi added, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Hu Jintao, the former president and mentor to Li, who was heavily escorted from a party conclave last year when Xi sealed a third term in office, sent a wreath of flowers, he added.
National flags in Tiananmen Square and other parts of Beijing were flown at half-staff on Thursday.
And near Babaoshan, where many notable Chinese officials are buried, about two hundred people, mostly elderly, gathered.
But they were outnumbered by police, who attempted to film the front of the cemetery from a passage blocked by a police vehicle.