BEIJING, March 10 – Chinese leaders on Tuesday paid their respects to Song Ping, the longest-lived member of the most powerful decision-making body in the Communist Party, who died last week in Beijing at the age of 109.
President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang and other members of the party’s current Politburo Standing Committee attended a ceremony that closed the chapter on a political career that spanned five generations of leaders of the People’s Republic.
They stood in silent tribute then bowed three times in front of his remains, which were draped in the red flag of the Communist Party, before he was cremated. The event was shown on state broadcaster CCTV.
“The life of Comrade Song Ping was a life of revolution, of struggle and of glory, a life spent in the pursuit of truth and progress and in dedication to the communist cause,” read an official account of his life released by state-run Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.
Born in 1917 into a family of farmers in the eastern province of Shandong, Song became a revolutionary youth when he joined the Communist Party in 1937.
He briefly served as a personal secretary of Zhou Enlai, who became communist China’s first premier after 1949.
Song, as an economic planner and the party’s personnel chief, was a prominent member of China’s second generation of leadership, an era when reform-minded Deng Xiaoping remade China after the 27-year rule of Mao Zedong ended in 1976 with Mao’s death.
He rose to the apex of power in China’s political system – the Standing Committee of the Politburo, comprised of only a handful of people – in June 1989, following the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Song was elevated by Deng to the top leadership in 1989, as Jiang Zemin emerged as the head of China’s third generation of leaders – a move partly made in recognition of Song’s commitment to Deng’s reform programme.
In the 1970s, while serving as the party chief of Gansu, a province in the country’s barren northwest that housed the young republic’s space and atomic programmes, Song sided with Deng in the tumultuous years following Mao’s death, as party elites debated whether to continue on the path set by Mao or to follow Deng’s call to modernise, reform and open up.
Song was also widely credited with bringing Hu Jintao, China’s leader before Xi, to the attention of Deng.
“Hu Jintao sent a wreath to express his condolences on the passing of Comrade Song Ping,” Xinhua reported on Tuesday.
Song retired from the Politburo in 1992, aged 75.
Popular and respected within the party for his seniority, Song remained politically active after his retirement. In 2022, already aged 105, he was seen on stage at a Communist Party meeting flanked by other retired senior officials.
(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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