Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported Tuesday that China has jailed Gu Wanming, a former bureau chief for the state-run Xinhua news service who dared to question the official account of Premier Li Keqiang’s death in 2023.
Li stepped down as premier in March 2023 after a decade in office, then died in Shanghai in October of that year, reportedly from a sudden heart attack. He was 68 years old at the time of his death, which is fairly young by the standards of the Chinese Communist Party elite.
Skeptics questioned the official account of Li’s death, since he had challenged dictator Xi Jinping’s agenda in his later years, instead endorsing the more “open” market-based reforms of Xi’s predecessor Deng Xiaoping.
Xi has created a political mythology that portrays Deng’s reign as a mere steppingstone to his own magnificence as the most consequential Communist Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. Li criticized Xi for centralizing too much power in Beijing and moving away from Deng’s reforms – and he had the temerity to discuss how badly Xi’s manic coronavirus lockdown policies damaged China’s economy. He also challenged the accuracy of economic data released by Xi’s government.
Li became something of a populist hero to those disgruntled by the downturn in China’s economy, memorialized as the “People’s Premier.” Some social media users daydreamed about what China might have become if Li took the helm instead of Xi.
The sudden demise of Li Keqiang came after a string of high-ranking Chinese officials vanished under mysterious circumstances, including the foreign and defense ministers. The timing fueled speculation that Li had been silenced, rather than dying of natural causes.
Xi’s government acted quickly to clamp down on public outpourings of grief for Li, fearing his death might cause political turbulence. This only raised more questions about the precise circumstances of his death, as did a rumor that Li’s obituary was written the day before he died.
Gu Wanming, a former bureau chief for the state-run Xinhua news service in the province of Guangdong, wrote an open letter three days after Li’s death in which he called for a serious investigation of the former premier’s passing. Among other things, he demanded a halt to the cremation of Li’s remains and a full autopsy of his body.
Gu also demanded a careful examination of the final days of Li’s life, including his circumstances at the Pudong Dongjiao Hotel in Shanghai, where he died.
RFA revealed that Li was arrested soon after publishing his open letter, using China’s handy all-purpose charge for jailing inconvenient people, “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble.” He was subsequently sentenced to a year in prison and, in December, Xinhua canceled all of his retirement benefits.
“They don’t say you’re a counterrevolutionary any more – they say you’re ‘stirring up trouble,’” a retired Xinhua reporter told RFA.
“He was a Xinhua bureau chief, yet he has lost all his benefits. They won’t even make sure he gets enough to eat in his later years. They do this to make sure you lose any integrity, especially anyone working in the system,” the ex-reporter said of Gu.
