Zhu’s membership of the ruling Communist Party was revoked in the late 1950s, for an incautious three-minute speech, he said. It was not restored for roughly two decades.

His death brought an outpouring of mourning on Chinese social media, but a few welcomed it.

“As the child of laid-off workers, I’ll have to raise a glass tonight,” said a post later removed from Weibo, China’s version of X, after news of his death.

Another called Zhu “the main culprit” for putting workers out of work, but others defended the iron-fisted premier.

“I know that quite a considerable number of ordinary people in China like me,” Zhu said in 2001.

“But there are also some who hate me to the core. How could one possibly make everyone love him?”

MANAGED GRIEF

Like other former premiers who have died in the last decade, Zhu’s death was treated in subdued and tightly managed fashion, with public expressions of grief unfolding under heightened security, scrutiny and censorship.

Chinese authorities have long seen the deaths of popular former leaders as a potential trigger for a surge of public emotion, and an occasional catalyst for instability when remembrance of the dead turns into criticism of those in power.