China censors mourning for reform-era premier as Xi guards against nostalgia

Flags hung at half-mast across Beijing this week as China observed the death of Zhu Rongji, the former premier who shaped the country's economic transformation in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Zhu died of illness at 97 and was cremated Tuesday at a state funeral attended by President Xi Jinping and other senior leaders—a ceremony deliberately kept quiet, with no footage released to the public. The restraint was telling. While state media dutifully praised Zhu as a "loyal" party member and "outstanding" Communist, the government moved swiftly to contain something far more dangerous than grief: nostalgia.

Online, posts remembering Zhu's era began disappearing almost as soon as they appeared. An essay by economist Zhao Jian, which circulated briefly on WeChat before being removed, captured what many seemed to be feeling. In Zhu's time, Zhao wrote, people were "properly poor" but possessed something harder to quantify—a sense that the future held possibility. "There were no smartphones then, no short-form videos and no screens filled by the purveyors of anxiety," he recalled. "The sky was blue, life moved slowly and people could say what they really thought." The post lasted a day before vanishing.

The party's anxiety is rooted in history. When former premier Zhou Enlai died in 1976, public mourning transformed into protest. The same happened in 1989 when former Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang passed away—grief became the spark for the demonstrations that ended in Tiananmen Square. The government knows that when Chinese people mourn a leader, they are often mourning something else: a road not taken, a version of their country that might have been.

Zhu served as premier from 1998 to 2003 alongside Jiang Zemin, who became party chief and then president. Together they steered China through wrenching economic changes—closing unprofitable state factories, dismantling the old housing system, weathering the Asian financial crisis, joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. The reforms were brutal and necessary. But what people remember now is not the pain but the style. Zhu was known for bluntness. He called corrupt bankers "half-wits" and described poorly maintained flood defenses as "flimsy and porous as tofu dregs." At a 1999 news conference, when asked about allegations that China had donated to Bill Clinton's campaign, he deadpanned: "If political contributions were that effective, and I have $146 billion in foreign reserves, why would I give only $300,000? That would be too foolish." The room laughed. It was the kind of candor that seems almost impossible now.

Xi Jinping, speaking Monday at a commemoration of Jiang Zemin's centenary, worked to rewrite this history. In a 40-minute address, he presented himself as the continuation of Jiang's project, not its departure. He praised Jiang's 1989 crackdown on a reformist Shanghai newspaper that had supported pro-democracy protests. The message was clear: everything that came before leads to everything now. There are no alternative paths, no roads not taken. "Xi is committed to the great renaissance of the Chinese nation," says Kerry Brown, a China scholar at King's College London. "He's trying to put forward a unified historic narrative—any idea that their leadership offered a different future path will not be allowed a public airing."

But the timing of this historical management reveals something about the present. Zhu and Jiang died within days of each other, and their passing marks the definitive end of an era. The breakneck growth of the 1990s and 2000s, the emphasis on private enterprise and wealth creation, the sense that opening to the world was inevitable—all of it belongs now to history. Xi has chosen a different path: greater central control, state-driven economic policy, focus on technological autonomy and strategic industries. The problem is that this path is running into headwinds. Economic growth has slowed. House prices have collapsed. Youth unemployment is high. Factory output is sluggish. The certainty that hard work would improve your life, which sustained people through the reforms of Zhu's era, has evaporated.

Zhao Jian's deleted essay ended with a question that the government cannot censor away: "We have material abundance, skylines bristling with high-rises, streets teeming with traffic. But why do we feel so empty inside?" The mourning for Zhu is mourning for a time when that question seemed to have an answer. The government's effort to contain it suggests they know how dangerous that memory has become.