China's top leadership assembled at a Beijing cemetery on August 18 for the funeral of Zhu Rongji, the former premier who steered the country through its most turbulent decade of market reforms. Zhu died on August 12 at age 98.
General Secretary Xi Jinping led a delegation that included all seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee to Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in western Beijing, where Zhu's body was cremated. Vice President Han Zheng also attended. Former General Secretary Hu Jintao, who has largely withdrawn from public life since his departure from the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, sent a commemorative wreath. Flags flew at half-staff at Tiananmen Square, the Great Hall of the People, and other major state institutions across the country.
Full Politburo Turns Out At Babaoshan For Final Rites
The show of official unity was striking. Having all seven Standing Committee members appear together at a funeral is rare; the gesture signaled that the party wished to honor Zhu with its highest available protocol. Whether that honor also extends to the economic philosophy he embodied is a harder question.
Babaoshan was placed under heavy security for the occasion. Police and paramilitary units were deployed densely around the cemetery perimeter, and journalists who arrived were questioned by officers and told photography was not permitted.
Mourners Dispersed As Security Locks Down Cemetery
Not all who came to pay respects were welcomed. Some Beijing residents adopted an informal strategy, gathering near the cemetery by ostensibly taking a stroll — a quiet, politically cautious form of public mourning. Police dispersed them regardless.
Those who managed to speak with reporters offered warm, wistful assessments of Zhu's time in office. "Looking back, it may have seemed he pushed things too far," said one retired state enterprise cadre. "But at that time, people could actually make money." The comment captured a widespread sentiment: nostalgia not only for a particular man, but for the economic optimism and relative candor of his era.
The Reformer Who Survived Being Called A Rightist
Zhu's biography is a study in contradiction. In 1957, during the Hundred Flowers Campaign — a brief, ultimately punishing period when Mao Zedong invited citizens to voice criticisms of the party — Zhu spoke up against the leadership of the State Planning Commission. He was promptly labeled a "rightist" and expelled from the Communist Party, spending nearly two decades working at the grassroots and in cadre re-education schools before being rehabilitated in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping began unwinding the most severe legacies of the Maoist era.
From that rehabilitation, Zhu rose steadily through reformist ranks to become vice premier and, from 1998 to 2003, premier. His tenure is defined in the record books by consequential and painful decisions: dismantling bloated state-owned enterprises, overhauling a fragile banking sector, and steering China through the shock waves of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He was known for saying what he thought, even when it made officials uncomfortable.
A Bluntness That Xi's China No Longer Produces
That frankness now reads almost as a period artifact. The Communist Party on August 18 honored Zhu with every symbol at its disposal — flags lowered, the full Standing Committee present, national institutions brought to a collective pause. Yet the political conditions that shaped him — the tolerance for internal friction, the space to name problems plainly — have narrowed considerably under Xi Jinping's leadership. （Related： Beijing Watch | Chinese Podcaster Who Charmed Nolan Faces Plagiarism Allegations ｜ Latest ）
What was laid to rest at Babaoshan may be more than a 98-year-old statesman. It may also be a particular kind of Chinese leader: one who could survive being cast as an enemy of the party, rise to its highest executive office, speak his mind throughout, and still be mourned by the people he governed.
