Zhu Rongji's Funeral Reveals Divide Between China's Past Prosperity and Present Malaise

The funeral of Zhu Rongji last week in Beijing was meant to be a statement of continuity. Here was the man who, as premier through much of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, had engineered China's transformation into an economic powerhouse—the architect of reforms that opened markets, modernized industry, and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. The current leadership wanted the occasion to say something clear: we are still on that path. We are still the party of growth and progress.

But the gap between what Beijing wanted to communicate and what many Chinese people actually felt was impossible to ignore. As officials invoked Zhu's name and legacy, as they drew lines connecting his era to today's policies, something else was happening in the country he had helped build. People were talking about the optimism that had once seemed so natural, so inevitable—and how distant it now felt.

Zhu Rongji's time in power coincided with a particular moment in modern Chinese history. The economy was expanding at double-digit rates. Cities were being remade. Jobs were plentiful. There was a sense, widely shared, that the future would be better than the present, and the present was already pretty good. It was not just about money, though money mattered. It was about possibility. It was about the feeling that you could plan ahead, that your children would have more than you did, that the trajectory was unmistakably upward.

That feeling has not survived intact into 2026. The economic growth that once seemed automatic has become fitful and uncertain. Youth unemployment has become a persistent problem. Real estate, which had been a reliable engine of wealth creation for ordinary families, has stalled. The stock market has disappointed. Small businesses report difficulty accessing credit. The sense of forward momentum—the thing that had made the Zhu era feel so different from what came before—has fractured.

What made the funeral significant was not the ceremony itself but what it exposed. Here was the state trying to claim ownership of a legacy of prosperity and dynamism, trying to say that the current moment is a natural continuation of that golden age. Yet the people who had lived through that golden age, and their children who had inherited its benefits, were experiencing something quite different now. The nostalgia was real. The disconnect was real.

The funeral became, in effect, a mirror held up to a question that Beijing would prefer not to have asked too loudly: if we are still following the path that Zhu Rongji laid down, why does the future feel so much less certain? Why has the optimism curdled into anxiety? Why do people speak about the 1990s and 2000s the way they might speak about a golden age that has passed, rather than as a foundation for what comes next?

For older Chinese, the comparison was unavoidable. They had lived through both eras. They remembered what it felt like when growth seemed inevitable, when opportunity seemed to be expanding rather than contracting. For younger Chinese, the contrast was different but no less pointed—they had grown up in the tail end of that prosperity, and they were now entering an economy that felt fundamentally less generous, less forgiving, less full of possibility.

The state's attempt to use Zhu's funeral as a moment of political messaging—to suggest that his legacy lives on in current policy—ran up against a stubborn fact: many Chinese citizens do not feel that legacy in their daily lives. They feel instead the weight of an economy that is no longer delivering the broad-based gains that had once seemed like the natural order of things. The funeral, meant to be about continuity, instead became a moment that threw the discontinuity into sharp relief.