The morning of Aug. 18

According to Xinhua and other Chinese state media, the cremation was held at the funeral hall of Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on the morning of Aug. 18. President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang, and Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, Li Xi and Han Zheng stood before the body in silence, bowed three times, and shook hands with family members. Former president Hu Jintao sent a wreath.

The half-mast order followed the notice issued on Aug. 15. It covered Tiananmen Square and Xinhuamen in the capital, the Great Hall of the People, the foreign ministry, the party and government seats of every province, autonomous region and municipality, the Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions, border crossings and open ports, and Chinese embassies and consulates abroad. State media published a biography and photographs the same day.

What kind of premiership

Zhu was born in Changsha, Hunan, in 1928 and graduated in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University. He worked at the State Planning Commission and the State Economic Commission, served as mayor of Shanghai from 1987 to 1991, then as vice premier, and was elected premier by the Ninth National People's Congress in March 1998. His term ran to March 2003.

His years in office overlapped with the aftershocks of the Asian financial crisis. The policy of holding the yuan's value steady, alongside large bond issues to fund infrastructure and support domestic demand, was carried out in this period. Restructuring of state-owned enterprises, disposal of bank non-performing loans, the marketisation of housing, and the tax-sharing system dividing revenue between central and local government are all associated with his name.

The WTO negotiations

Abroad, the WTO accession talks are the best known chapter. A visit to Washington in April 1999 ended without agreement, but a bilateral accord was signed in Beijing that November and China formally joined the WTO in December 2001. Chinese foreign trade expanded rapidly afterwards, and the decision is repeatedly cited as a turning point in accounts of global supply chains over the two decades that followed.

After leaving office he was rarely seen in public. Collections of his remarks and press conference transcripts published in 2011 and 2013 were widely read, and he was known for scholarship activity linked to Tsinghua's school of economics and management. His last public appearance dates to before 2018.

Weight in Chinese communities abroad

Among overseas Chinese communities the name is tied to a particular period. The late 1990s and early 2000s were years in which trade and investment channels between the mainland and overseas Chinese businesses widened as a matter of rules, and WTO entry gave those channels a rulebook. Among Chinese business people in Korea it is not hard to find recollections that dealings changed in form and scale from that period onward.

The funeral followed convention, with no large memorial meeting, only the cremation and the half-mast order. Hong Kong and Taiwanese outlets reported that residents gathered along the route as the body was taken to Babaoshan. Chinese coverage that day was built around his titles and career record.

A third perspective

Hwagyo Sibo does not take a seat at the table where a life is judged. What is confirmed is the date of the death and of the cremation, the list of places where flags were lowered, and the five years he served as premier. Interpretations of those five years have accumulated differently on the mainland, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and among Chinese communities abroad, and we will not force them into one. One thing is worth recording. Many of the households reading this page lived through those five years as a change in the everyday layer: trade thresholds fell, travel procedures shifted. Separate from any political verdict, those changes remain facts. We will keep recording that side.