Overview
- Zhu Rongji was cremated at Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Tuesday, Aug. 18, in a ceremony attended by President Xi Jinping and the full current Politburo Standing Committee with national flags flown at half-mast.
- State media published an official obituary calling Zhu a loyal, time-tested party member and praised his role as premier from 1998 to 2003 while following prescribed funeral protocols of bows, silence and condolence visits with the family.
- Zhu is credited with major market reforms that helped secure China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, overhaul state-owned enterprises, push housing privatization and enact the 1994 tax-sharing changes that shifted revenue pressures onto local governments.
- Those reforms also produced large social costs—reporting and economists cite more than 30 million job losses, a rise in private home ownership alongside weakened social safety nets, and long-term dependence by local governments on land-sale revenue.
- Authorities tightly managed public mourning by limiting footage, boosting security, and removing some online tributes and critical essays, a response that has stoked nostalgia for the 1990s reform era and raised sensitive political questions ahead of the next party leadership transition.