Li Keqiang: Ex-Chinese premier sidelined by Xi dies at 68The death of a leader in China can usher in big changes, it did after Mao Zedong, or can lead to political upheaval, like it did when grieving for Hu Yaobang morphed into the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
For this reason, the passing of former premier Li Keqiang has already triggered various measures to ensure that stability is maintained.
A crackdown on VPN use is under way to reduce the access of Chinese citizens to the parts of the internet not controlled by the Communist Party.
The Party doesn't want mourning for a popular, liberal, former number two leader to generate wider criticism of the current administration, led by Xi Jinping.
It is not just that Li died so suddenly, suffering a heart attack just months after stepping down, but because of what he represented: a way of potentially governing China with different priorities to those of the General Secretary Xi.
He was a bright pragmatist who didn't seem so concerned with ideology. And this is one reason why he cut such a lonely figure in the previous, seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, the country's most powerful decision-making body.
Li Keqiang: The life of China's marginalised premier
Xi Jinping's power grab - and why it matters
Then there's what would become known as the "Li Keqiang Index" which was born via a famous US state department memo, and came to light in Wikileaks. As the then Party Secretary of Liaoning Province, Li is said to have told the US ambassador in 2007 that the local GDP figures were unreliable as a way of judging economic health.
He reportedly said that he used three other indicators to analyse growth: railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and bank loan disbursements.
Criticising China's official statistics, even behind closed doors, to the Americans cannot have gone down well with his political opponents.
The former premier was considered one of the smartest political figures of his generation. He was accepted into the prestigious Peking University Law School soon after the universities were reopened following Chairman Mao's disastrous Cultural Revolution.
In a Party dominated by engineers, he was an economist, who become known for "telling it like it is" by honestly and publicly acknowledging China's economic problems as a means of finding solutions to them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-67236049https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67235777