On December 6 they will be held Jiang Zemin’s funeral, the leader who led China in the 1990s as the country’s president and general secretary of the Communist Party, died on Wednesday at the age of 96. For the occasion, and to manage the complicated funeral procedures, it was created a commission made up of dozens of officials and managers high-ranking party leader, who has already given a number of instructions, such as holding flags at half-mast in all public buildings until the day of the funeral. The People’s newspaperthe country’s main newspaper, published an all-black-and-white front page on Thursday, and some Chinese government and social networking sites also put their screenshots in black-and-white on Thursday, as a sign of mourning.
A Chinese government website in black and white as a sign of mourning
Jiang’s will be the first major funeral for a Chinese leader since 1997 (that’s the year Deng Xiaoping, who was China’s leader after Mao Zedong, died), and there is some turmoil in the Communist Party leadership, as they said these days lot of average.
The fact is that in China’s recent history, the funerals of great leaders have often been an occasion for the population to protest and express their discontent. And at a time when there have already been exceptional protests against the lockdowns and pandemic restrictions, the risk for the regime is that Jiang’s funeral will also become an occasion for protests and demonstrations.
People’s Daily front page after Deng Xiaoping’s death in February 1997 and today after Jiang Zemin’s death pic.twitter.com/hYf7f1oegH
— Lorenzo Lamperti (@LorenzoLamperti) December 1, 2022
The most famous demonstrations that began in China on the occasion of the funeral of a well-known leader were the famous Tiananmen Square protests. Officially, the protests began to commemorate Hu Yaobang, who had been secretary of the Communist Party and died in April 1989. Although Hu Yaobang had been only a moderately reformist leader, his death was the occasion around which various reasons for discontent on the part of the population, linked to the economic difficulties, intolerance towards the closure of the regime and the slowness of both economic and social reforms.
Hu Yaobang’s funeral was held on April 22, 1989. The day before, April 21, 100,000 students staged a large anti-regime demonstration, which soon resulted in the occupation of the large Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. The protests were then violently repressed on June 4, when the regime sent in the army to clear the square: hundreds, or more likely thousands, of people were killed.
Before that, other particularly controversial funerals that became the occasion for protests and demonstrations were those of Zhou Enlai in 1976. Zhou was the premier of communist China for almost thirty years, from 1949 to his death: he was a hero of the revolutionary war and was much appreciated from the population.
Jiang Zemin was not as popular, especially while in power. But in the following years, especially after Xi Jinping became president of the country, many Chinese citizens began to regard Jiang with more leniency, and in some cases almost with nostalgia, mainly for two reasons: first, because his over the top personality in recent years it has become more famous as time has passed. Because of his slightly bulging eyes, Jiang was called “the toad”, but over the years this nickname has become somewhat affectionate. Jiang, with his goggles and his high waisted pantsbecame the subject of countless memes, and when he turned 90 in 2016 he was celebrated online with a certain ironic enthusiasm.
Above all, Jiang’s period of rule has been seen in retrospect as relatively liberal, and above all a period in which China was booming economically, and hopes and prospects seemed limitless.
Jiang was actually a rather repressive leader, who persecuted various non-aligned movements, starting with the Falun Gong religious group and the independentists of Tibet. But in the 1990s, when Jiang ruled (as well as in the 2000s, when his successor Hu Jintao ruled) the repression for most Chinese was less oppressive, there were spaces for public discussion and personal economic initiative, and the media they were also freer to criticize the government. All of this ended starting in 2013, when the current president Xi Jinping gradually eliminated most of the spaces for freedom and discussion.
A commemorative comment on social networks quoted from the New York Times was: ‘Toad, we’ve been too hard on you; you are the ceiling, not the floor.’ The idea is that under Jiang, China reached one of its moments of maximum openness and development, even if at the time practically nobody was convinced of it.
For now, this nostalgia is expressed online, but the regime wants to avoid in any way that it translates into street movements, especially at a time when discontent is very high throughout China.
