Security was tightened across the city, particularly around Tiananmen Square, the centre of China's political power. The square lies along the eastbound route to the Babaoshan crematorium, where top leaders ​are typically cremated.

China's vice premier from 1991 to 1998 and premier from 1998 ​to 2003, Zhu helped drive the country's hard-edged economic overhaul in the ⁠1990s.

He curbed runaway inflation, tightened tax and banking systems, and pushed through a ​sweeping state-sector shake-up that cost millions of jobs at unprofitable state firms. His reforms also ​helped clear the way for China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, deepening its integration into the global economy.

"My defining trait – my guiding principle – is independent thinking," Zhu told officials in ​Shanghai in 1988 before he became the city's mayor. "I believe I should say what ​I truly think."

Zhu had his party membership revoked in the late 1950s, for an incautious three-minute speech, ‌he ⁠said. It was not restored for roughly two decades.

Zhu's death prompted widespread mourning on Chinese social media, but it also drew a minority of posts that welcomed his passing.

Like other former premiers who have died in the last decade, Zhu's death was treated ​in a subdued and ​tightly managed manner, with ⁠public expressions of grief unfolding under heightened security, scrutiny and censorship.

The deaths of popular former leaders have long presented Chinese authorities ​with a potential trigger for an outpouring of public emotion, and, ​at times, ⁠a catalyst for instability when remembrance of the deceased turns into criticism of those left in power.

In 1976, following the death of Zhou Enlai – the People's Republic of China's first ⁠and ​widely respected premier – tens of thousands of people gathered ​in Tiananmen Square and surrounding streets in Beijing. Their mourning became a protest against the excesses of the ​Cultural Revolution and radical officials associated with it.