In China, the very controlled tribute to former Prime Minister Li Keqiang, “last leader of the reform era”

2023-11-02 13:23:45
Passersby take photos of the house where former Premier Li Keqiang spent his childhood, in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, Sunday, October 28, 2023. AP

Chinese flags were only raised halfway this morning in China, on all official buildings in tribute to Li Keqiang, the former prime minister who died on October 27 of a heart attack. The statesman, still in office in March, was cremated and his ashes stored at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, where heroes of the revolution and leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have been buried since the establishment of the Republic People’s Republic of China in 1949. Images broadcast by state media show President Xi Jinping offering his condolences to Li Keqiang’s relatives. His burial, seven days after his death, marks the end of a modest tribute on the part of the State and the Party for the former Chinese number two, who saw his role gradually reduced to that of administrator by all. -powerful leader Xi Jinping.

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The tribute to a prime minister is naturally more modest than that planned for a head of state and of the Communist Party, like Jiang Zemin, who received a national tribute and the honors of a speech from Xi Jinping after his death at the end of 2022 But after a career in the shadow of Xi Jinping, the discretion of the media, for a leader still in office eight months ago, seems inappropriate for many Chinese who wanted to pay tribute themselves to the “people’s prime minister”. In recent days, thousands of people have flocked to his thatched family home in a village in Anhui, west of Shanghai, and to his former residence in Hefei, the provincial capital, as well as in Henan and Liaoning, two provinces that he governed, to place bouquets of chrysanthemums.

The tributes expressed for the former Chinese number two are also an opportunity for some to express their frustration with number one, Xi Jinping, who has gradually locked all the levers of power since his arrival at the top, at the end 2012. On the networks, a video was widely distributed: we see Li Keqiang affirming in a speech that economic reforms and the opening of China to the world are an irreversible process, “just as the Yangtze and the Yellow River cannot flow backward”. This sentence, uttered in 2022, after two and a half years of closing Chinese borders and while the country was increasing lockdowns, seemed like wishful thinking, and it is without illusion that Chinese Internet users are repeating it today.

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