Crowds gather near state funeral home as China’s former Premier Li Keqiang is being put to rest

BEIJING (AP) — Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people gathered near a state funeral home Thursday as former Premier Li Keqiang was being put to rest.

In front of the funeral home, plainclothes and uniformed police lined the roadway for hundreds of meters (yards), blocking traffic and telling people to move along and watching for the presence of any unofficial or foreign media. Police also moved people away from a subway station near the Babaoshan cemetery where state funerals are held and many top leaders are buried.

Flags, including the nation’s most famous standard that flies over Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital, were lowered to half-staff at government and party offices around the country and at Chinese embassies and consulates abroad.

Li died last Friday of a heart attack at age 68. State media had said he would be cremated Thursday but didn’t mention funeral plans. According to precedent, retired high-level officials usually lie in state briefly as top leaders pass the body and offer wreaths of white flowers, the traditional color of mourning.

Li was China’s No. 2 leader and helped guide China’s economy for a decade before being dropped from the Communist Party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee in October 2022. He left office in March 2023, despite being two years below the informal retirement age of 70.

Though his time in office was marked by numerous crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and Li showed little zeal for reform, he was seen as an alternative to increasingly authoritarian party leader Xi Jinping. Li was left with little authority after Xi made himself the most powerful Chinese leader in decades and tightened control over the economy and society.

Xi awarded himself a third five-year term as party leader and filled the top party ranks with loyalists. The No. 2 slot was filled by Li Qiang, the party secretary for Shanghai, who lacked Li Keqiang’s national-level experience and later told reporters that his job was to do whatever Xi decided.