Daughter rejects Chinese state funeral for her father, Mao’s personal secretary
Whenever there’s a
clash between the party and humanity. I insist on humanity
The daughter of Mao
Zedong’s personal secretary is boycotting her father’s funeral, which she says
is taking place against his wishes in a cemetery reserved for high-ranking
revolutionary figures. According to Nanyang
Li, her father Li Rui will be interred in the Babaoshan cemetery on Wednesday
in an official ceremony at which the Chinese Communist Party flag will be
draped over his casket. The official funeral
is not what Li, who had lost faith in the Chinese Communist party, would have
wanted, his daughter said. Li died on Saturday in
a hospital in Beijing from organ failure. His death marks the end of a
generation of revolutionaries who joined the party out of commitment to
socialist ideals and pushed for reforms. Li was elevated, imprisoned, banished
and rehabilitated by the party he joined as a young activist in 1937.
Nanyang said she first
spoke with her father about his wishes for his burial in 2008 and again last
April at the time of his 100th birthday. “I asked him the exact same question: do you
want to go to Babaoshan? Do you want a formal funeral and your body to be
covered by the [Chinese Communist party] flag?’” she told the Guardian. “He paused a long long
time, thinking, then he very clearly said: ‘I should go back to my hometown and
be buried near my parents because I left home so early and never took care of
my mother.’” Asked about a flag on
his casket, Li said: “The red colour is a bad colour. You see it on TV. Now,
everything is red, red, red.” Nanyang, who lives in
the US, said she would not be attending the funeral in protest. Zhang Lifan, an
independent historian based in Beijing who knew Li, said people such as Li “are
becoming history. There are fewer of them left. The reformers, the liberals are
withering”.
Born in 1917 in the
southern province of Hunan, Li was an activist from a young age, leading
protests against local warlords. In university, he joined a Communist-organised
student movement against the Japanese occupation. In 1937, he joined Mao and
his soldiers in Yanan in north-western China. By the late 1950s, Li
was handpicked by Mao to be one of his personal secretaries. He was purged
after he criticised Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy, the collectivision of
agricultural production that led to mass famine and the deaths of up to 60
million people.
During the Cultural
Revolution, a period of violent political purges across the country, Li spent
almost nine years in prison. He ran in place and practised qigong to
stay healthy and sane. In 1978, after Mao’s death, he was allowed back into the
party, and remained a member until his death.
Li, whose name Rui
means sharp, voiced his views in articles, books and interviews. Li believed in
constitutionalism and consistently called on the Chinese government to come to a
reckoning with its history, including the violent crackdown on student
protesters in 1989. “Whenever there’s a
clash between the party and humanity. I insist on humanity,” he told the BBC in
an interview in 2017... read more:
