20.02.

2019 In Beijing, a Communist Funeral for an Inconvenient Critic - The New York Times

In Beijing, a Communist Funeral for an

Inconvenient Critic
By Chris Buckley

Feb. 20, 2019

BEIJING — While alive, Li Rui was a decades-long headache for China’s ruling Communists —
a former aide to Mao Zedong who became an obdurate, sharp-tongued critic of the party. And
the controversy did not stop in death, even for his funeral.

Hundreds of people gathered in Beijing on Wednesday to say goodbye to Mr. Li, four days after
his death at 101. But the funeral revealed tensions between the government, which wanted a
brisk Communist ceremony, and mourners who celebrated Mr. Li as a renegade — one who,
even as he lay dying, railed against the authoritarian policies of Xi Jinping, the party’s leader
and China’s president.

Mr. Li’s daughter, Li Nanyang, stayed away from the ceremony at Babaoshan cemetery in the
capital’s west, where members of China’s political elite are cremated and laid to rest. She said
her father had not wanted a stiff, official funeral featuring cookie-cutter eulogies or “red”
symbolism that would suggest he had remained devoted to the party.

“He wished to be remembered as Li Rui, not as a Communist Party cadre enjoying ministerial-
level official protocol,” Ms. Li said by telephone from California, where she lives, before the
funeral.

In conversations with her, Ms. Li said, her father had objected to the idea of lying in a coffin
with the party’s red banner on top, and to any eulogies and obituaries that praised him as a
loyal Marxist.

“My father’s wish about the party banner clearly was about rejecting the Communist Party,”
she said. “The party banner symbolized the party occupying someone’s heart.”

But in the end, Mr. Li’s funeral followed party protocol.

Mourners who passed by his coffin said it was covered in the red banner of a Chinese
Communist. (Foreign journalists were not allowed inside the hall.)

Wu Wei, a former official who knew Mr. Li, said that according to his widow and other family
members, he had not objected in a will to a funeral along party lines. Therefore, he said, they
would not go along with what Ms. Li said were her father’s wishes.

“What I want to say now is that Li Rui, a centenarian, has departed, so let him quietly depart,”
his widow, Zhang Yuzhen, said in a written message distributed to mourners.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/asia/china-li-rui-funeral.html 1/3
20.02.2019 In Beijing, a Communist Funeral for an Inconvenient Critic - The New York Times

Even so, the funeral also became a rallying point for people who embraced his hope for a more
democratic China.

In a reflection of Mr. Li’s dual life — a former senior official who rebelled against the party he
had joined in 1937 — the hundreds of mourners included aged former cadres, often stooped or
in wheelchairs; graying sons and daughters of revolutionary veterans; prominent historians;
dissidents; and ordinary citizens who came to know Mr. Li through his critical books about
Mao.

Mr. Li in 2006. Once a secretary to Mao Zedong, he

became a sharp-tongued critic of the Communist
Party’s authoritarianism.
Goh Chai Hin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A few paid tribute to Mr. Li by holding up handwritten signs, or by making brief speeches that
praised him as a freethinker who had stood up to Mao — opposing the calamitous excesses of
the Great Leap Forward — and pressed Mao’s successors to take China in a more liberal
direction. Police officers and officials kept watch, and tried to keep foreign reporters from
talking to mourners throughout the morning.

“He was someone who had the guts to speak up for the people,” said Sheng Lianqi, a retired
worker in his 70s, who said he never met Mr. Li but admired his writings.

He held up a handwritten sign that read in part: “Li Rui’s name will live in eternity. The
ordinary people have sharp eyes and clear minds.”

Mr. Li leapt into Mao’s inner circle in the late 1950s, serving as one of the chairman’s
secretaries until they had a falling out. Mr. Li was banished from office and suffered decades of
imprisonment and persecution.

But like many other purged officials, he returned to work after the death of Mao and the end of
his frenzied Cultural Revolution. Many officials admired Mr. Li as a reformist who tried to
recruit young blood into the party and to redress the injustices of Mao’s era.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/asia/china-li-rui-funeral.html 2/3
20.02.2019 In Beijing, a Communist Funeral for an Inconvenient Critic - The New York Times

Even if Chinese leaders came to detest Mr. Li’s constant criticisms, they discreetly paid their
respects on Wednesday. Several people who passed by Mr. Li’s coffin said they saw wreathes
sent from Mr. Xi, as well as from China’s premier, Li Keqiang, and other senior leaders, both
retired and still in office.

But the party has mostly kept its distance and doused down talk of Mr. Li since he died on
Saturday. State media have been silent about his passing, with none of the obituaries and
tributes that usually accompany the death of a prominent official.

Many comments about his life and death on the Chinese internet were removed by censors.
And, unusually, the party did not issue an official obituary, called a “shengping” in Chinese,
before or at the funeral.

Party leaders had reason to be cautious. Even around the time of his 101st birthday last year,
Mr. Li made sharp-tongued criticisms of the party and of Mr. Xi.

Early on, Mr. Li had hoped that Mr. Xi would be a relatively moderate leader, and he was
dismayed by the staunch policies Mr. Xi pursued, said Bao Tong, an ousted former official who
was friends with Mr. Li.

“His ideas became clearer and clearer,” Mr. Bao said of Mr. Li by telephone. “Originally he
argued that the party’s approach was wrong, but later he concluded that the whole direction of
the country was wrong, not just the party, but the whole nation.”

These days, the party restricts criticism of Mao. But Mr. Li seemed determined to have the last
word. He donated many of his papers — including notebooks and letters from his decades in
the party, and a diary he kept for more than 80 years — to the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, where scholars will eventually be able to study them, said his daughter, Ms. Li.

“He said that we had to have a reckoning with Mao, or there would be endless trouble,” Ms. Li
said. “Sure enough, that’s the case now.”

Albee Zhang contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/asia/china-li-rui-funeral.html 3/3