The sudden death of China's former Premier Li Keqiang has spurred an outpouring of grief and mourning across the country. But for many, it also appears to offer a rare opening to air pent-up discontent with top leader Xi Jinping and the direction he has taken the country.
Li, who served as Xi's nominal second-in-command for a decade until March this year, died of a sudden heart attack Friday in Shanghai, according to state media. He was 68.
His death, just months after his retirement, shocked the Chinese public. Tributes have flooded the country's tightly controlled internet, while a sea of yellow and white bouquets left in makeshift memorials have sprung up outside his childhood residence and other places connected to his past.
On social media posts and handwritten notes tucked in between the floral tributes, many people commemorated Li for his unrealized aspirations rather than his policy achievements.
Widely seen as being sidelined by Xi – China's most powerful leader in a generation – Li was considered one of the weakest premiers in Communist China's history. So instead, many mourners have focused on Li's unfulfilled visions which, in their view, could have led China on a much different path than the one it has trodden over in the past decade.
"People use this opportunity to express disaffection with Xi Jinping," said Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. "It's a kind of anger – anger toward the current regime."
A highly educated, reform-minded pragmatist, Li was once seen as a contender for China's top job. But he ended up as the premier – a role traditionally in charge of the economy.
Normally that position comes with significant influence in the world's second-largest economy but Li saw his policymaking power gradually eclipsed by Xi, who has centralized control and moved away from the ruling Communist Party's collective leadership of more recent decades.
To many people, Li represents the potential for an alternative China – less ideologically driven, less authoritarian and more embracing of market reforms, entrepreneurship and connections with the outside world.
Mourners shared Li's own words as a tribute to him – but also as a not-so-subtle criticism of Xi. Among the most cited was a pledge from Li that China's reform and opening will never stop, in the same way that "the Yellow River and Yangtze River will not flow backward." Another of Li's quotes was mentioned widely as a veiled reminder that a leader's actions will be judged by history: "The heavens are watching what people are doing."
Zhang Lun, a professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Cergy-Pontoise in France, said the wave of tributes reflected a "growing discontent toward Xi's retrogressive policies" over the past decade: the ever-tightening ideological control, the ever-shrinking personal freedoms and the incessant political campaigns that hark back to the era of Mao Zedong, the founder of Communist China.
A large part of the frustration also stemmed from three years of Xi's strict zero-Covid policies, which battered the economy and subjected millions of Chinese to constant tests, quarantines and citywide lockdowns. Those tough restrictions were lifted abruptly after mass protests broke out across the country.
Adding to the frustration is an ongoing sense of confusion and hopelessness about the future, spurred by China's economic downturn and inward turn from the world – and all these sentiments were looking for an outlet, said Zhang, who studied at the prestigious Peking University with Li in the late 1970s after the end of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
"In an era where truth is silenced and false, big and empty statements prevail, the basic principles that Li Keqiang adhered to have become very precious things," he said.
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