Funeral Held In Beijing For Mao Assistant Li Rui

The funeral of Mao Zedong's personal secretary, Li Rui, was held on Wednesday at Babaoshan in Beijing, at a cemetery reserved for high-level revolutionary figures.

Hundreds of people attended the ceremony to pay their final respects to Li, who died last Saturday at the age of 101.

Some of those who were at the funeral told RTHK that a Communist Party flag was draped over his casket, even though Li's daughter, Li Nanyang, had said that was not what her father would have wanted.

Li Nanyang, who lives in the US, boycotted the funeral, having told the media that her father had lost faith in the Communist Party and had made it clear that he did not want to receive a state funeral.

She said he had told her that he would rather be interred near his parents in their hometown in Hunan province.

Li Rui joined the Communist Party in 1937 and was hand-picked by Mao to become his personal secretary in 1958.

But he was jailed after criticising Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, which is believed to have left as many as 60 million people dead.

Being one of the original revolutionaries gave Li Rui the freedom to publicly comment on what he felt were mistakes made by the party.

In 2013, he warned that President Xi Jinping was echoing Mao's suppression of individual thought and said Xi was trying to create a similar personality cult.