China seeks to stifle public grief for former premier Li Keqiang

 Censorship targets ‘overly effusive’ comments, gatherings or references to Li’s views on economic reform

People lay flowers outside a building where the late Chinese premier Li Keqiang lived as a child in Hefei city, Anhui province, China. Remembering Li fondly is a ‘veiled articulation of unhappiness about Xi’, says one expert. Photograph: AP

Amy Hawkins

@amyhawk_

Mon 30 Oct 2023 19.04 GMT

Public tributes to China’s former premier Li Keqiang, who died on Friday, are being strictly controlled as the government seeks to prevent a mass outpouring of grief that could lead to social unrest.

Li suffered a sudden heart attack in Shanghai and died in the early hours of Friday, according to Xinhua news agency.

There have been public displays of grief, particularly in his home city of Hefei, in Anhui province, where hundreds of mourners laid flowers for one of their most significant sons.

Social media is awash with tributes to Li, who was once seen as a force for economic liberalisation in the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist party (CCP). But discussion online has been strictly censored to ensure that Li’s legacy adheres to the official narrative and does not mention talking points about political or economic reform.

A leaked memo, published by China Digital Times, shows that media outlets have been instructed to “pay particular attention to overly effusive comments” regarding Li’s death.

Many of the comments that referenced Li’s reputation as an economic reformer were deleted. One comment that was censored from Weibo cited a Li quote from his first year as premier: “Whatever the market can handle, let the market do more of.”

A man reads a newspaper with an obituary of Li Keqiang on a bulletin board in Beijing. Photograph: Tingshu Wang/Reuters

Despite being China’s premier for a decade, it is not clear whether Li will receive an official memorial in addition to regular funeral arrangements. At the regular foreign ministry press briefing on Friday, spokesperson Mao Ning declined to elaborate on any plans.

Students, seen by CCP elites as the most volatile demographic when it comes to protests, are being instructed to refrain from public displays that go beyond the official lines. Screenshots circulating on social media show a message from the youth league committee at Hainan University instructing students to “at most” share Li’s official obituary. The notice said any online or offline gatherings were “strictly prohibited”, according to a report in Taiwanese media.

Another notice posted to students at the Guiyang Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics asked them not to make any comments about the “political situation” and to refrain from any public gatherings.

A man bows in front of the former house of Li Keqiang in Dingyuan county, Chuzhou city, in China’s eastern Anhui province. Photograph: Rebecca Bailey/AFP/Getty Images

When Li became premier in 2013, he was seen as someone who would embrace private enterprise and allow the free market to flourish. But he was gradually sidelined by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, who has reasserted the CCP’s grip on all parts of the economy. To many, Li now represents the path not taken by China’s increasingly authoritarian government.

The CCP is particularly fearful about reaction to deaths of senior officials or public figures. The deaths of former premier Zhou Enlai in 1976 and Hu Yaobang, a former CCP general secretary, in 1989, prompted widespread outpourings of grief that morphed into protests.

More recently, the deaths of Covid whistleblower Li Wenliang in 2020 and people in an apartment fire in Xinjiang in 2022 triggered expressions of public grief – with the latter becoming the “white paper” protests that spread across several cities at the end of last year. The CCP leaders are “haunted” by these memories, said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine.

Many people have flocked to the Weibo page of Li Wenliang to pay their tributes to the more recently departed Li Keqiang. “Today, it seems another truth-teller with the surname Li has departed,” wrote one, in a post archived by China Digital Times.

Li Yuan, a columnist for the New York Times, described the public grief as “the most significant outpouring of emotion since the white paper movement”.

New footage from China congress fuels questions about why Hu Jintao was hauled out – video

Wasserstrom added: “There is definitely a lot of discontent in some quarters about Xi Jinping and little room to express it without taking a big risk … Expressing regret for Li’s death provides an opportunity for doing this in at least a veiled way.”

Prof Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute, also said that “remembering Li fondly is a veiled articulation of unhappiness about Xi”.

With that in mind, Tsang said there was “no chance” that Xi would allow “anything but a small family affair” for Li.

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/china-seeks-to-stifle-public-grief-for-former-premier-li-keqiang

Li Keqiang, former premier of China, dies aged 68

Li served as China’s number two leader for 10 years before being sidelined by Xi Jinping

China’s former premier Li Keqiang has died after suffering a heart attack in Shanghai, state media reported. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

Helen Davidson in Taipei and agencies

Fri 27 Oct 2023 01.32 BST

China’s former premier, Li Keqiang, has died suddenly at the age of 68, according to Chinese state media. Li had a heart attack and died in Shanghai early on Friday, according to China’s Xinhua news agency.

“Comrade Li Keqiang, while resting in Shanghai in recent days, experienced a sudden heart attack on Oct 26 and after all-out efforts to revive him failed, died in Shanghai at ten minutes past midnight on Oct 27,” the state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Observers said Li would be remembered as an advocate for a freer market and China’s more impoverished citizens, but also as a symbol of the political alternative sidelined by the autocratic rise of Xi Jinping.

Li was premier – the second-highest position in China’s political system – for a decade from 2013 until he was replaced by Li Qiang in March.

“No matter how the international winds and clouds change, China will unswervingly expand its opening up,” Li said in March, at his last public appearance in a press conference. “The Yangtze River and the Yellow River will not flow backwards.”

In a sign of how the news of his death was being handled by the authorities, some social media users reported that they had been blocked from posting footage of his remarks. In the past, mourning events after the deaths of former leaders have been used by people to express discontent with the current regime.

On Friday morning Li’s death was the top trending topic on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform. Many commenters expressed shock and grief but comments on posts – which were mostly limited to news and government accounts – were restricted or controlled, with only a selection visible.

Earlier in the day there had been some posts of a song titled “Unfortunately not you” by Fish Leong, which netizens have taken to sharing when a world leader dies, in an apparent reference to Xi, who cannot be openly criticised safely.

Li was believed to be popular among Chinese people and officials, even after his removal as premier. Seen as former leader Hu Jintao’s preferred successor as president, he was overlooked when the leadership chose Xi Jinping in 2012. Li and Hu were both members of Xi’s rival faction within the Chinese Communist party, but its cohort has been sidelined in recent years as Xi consolidated his personal power and moved acolytes into key positions.

“His decade-long tenure also saw a general inability to prevent the political decline of Li’s and his mentor Hu Jintao’s power base, the Communist Youth League,” said Wen-ti Sung, a China expert at the Australian National University.

The son of a local official in the impoverished province of Anhui, Li was sent to the countryside to work as a manual labourer during the Cultural Revolution. He went on to gain a law degree from Peking University, where classmates say he embraced western and liberal political theory, translating a book on the law by a British judge.

But he became more orthodox after joining the ranks of officialdom in the mid-80s, working as a bureaucrat while his former classmates protested in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and rising up the ranks through his involvement in the Communist party Youth League.

In 1998 he became China’s youngest governor, appointed to the densely populated central province of Henan, where he later become party secretary. His reputation was damaged by his handling of an HIV/Aids epidemic stemming from a tainted blood donation programme while in the role. After a stint as party chief of the northern province of Liaoning, he was promoted to a vice-premier under former premier Wen Jiabao from 2008 to 2013, overseeing economic development and macroeconomic management.

He was known internationally in part for the “Li Keqiang index”, a term coined by the Economist for an informal measurement of China’s economic progress. It was based on a leaked conversation between Li and a US diplomat when Li was party chief in Liaoning. Li reportedly said the province’s GDP figures were “unreliable” and suggested a clearer picture could be taken from electricity consumption, rail cargo and bank lending data.

Sung said Li would likely be remembered as having “looked out for the little guys”, citing Li’s statement during the pandemic that: “600 million Chinese people still make barely 1,000 RMB a month. After Covid people’s livelihood should be our priority.”

But Sung said he would also be remembered for what “could have been”.

Li was a proponent of economic reform, and had at times spoken of China’s economic and social challenges. However, he largely toed the party line, particularly as Xi tightened his grip on power.

During his farewell tour of ministries earlier this year Li renewed calls for economic reform, and videos of him visiting some departments and being warmly greeted were later censored from Chinese social media.

Adam Ni, an independent China political analyst and author, described Li as “a premier who stood powerless as China took a sharp turn away from reform and opening”.

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/27/li-keqiang-former-premier-of-china-dies-aged-68-state-media