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

The tribute to a prime minister is naturally more modest than that planned for a head of state and of the Communist Party, such as 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 Xi Jinping's shadow, the media's discretion, for a leader who was still in office eight months ago, seemed inappropriate to many Chinese, who wanted to pay their own tribute to the "people's prime minister." In recent days, thousands of people have flocked to his thatched-roof family home in a village in Anhui, west of Shanghai, to his former residence in Hefei, the provincial capital, and to Henan and Liaoning, two provinces he once governed, to lay bouquets of chrysanthemums.

The tributes paid to China's former number two are also an opportunity for some to express their frustration with the country's number one, Xi Jinping, who has steadily consolidated control over all levers of power since he arrived at the top at the end of 2012. On social media, a video has been widely circulated: it shows Li Keqiang asserting in a speech that China's economic reforms and opening up to the world are an irreversible process, "just as the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers cannot flow backward." This sentence, uttered in 2022, after two and a half years of closed Chinese borders and amid surging lockdowns, sounded like wishful thinking, and it's without illusion that Chinese internet users are repeating it today.

Li Keqiang, one of the least influential prime ministers since 1949, seems to be celebrated not for what he achieved, but for what he stood for: an open leader, relatively close to the people, and supportive of private entrepreneurship. "The Chinese honor Li not because he did a good job, but because the man who stripped him of his power, Xi Jinping, did a bad job," said Chen Daoyin, who was an associate professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law before going into exile in Chile. It's a way of expressing their grief and helplessness about the future of their country, and their sympathy for the "600 million people earning less than 1,000 yuan." In 2020, Li Keqiang surprised many by pointing out that over a third of the Chinese population lived on less than 1,000 yuan (€129 euro) a month, even though Xi Jinping had celebrated the abolition of extreme poverty in China a few months earlier.

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