Another sign of just how brittle and petty the Xi regime in China can be. Today, former Premiere Li Keqiang died from a heart attack. He has been the country’s top economic advisor for about a decade and is associated with China’s previously booming economy. He was replaced earlier this year.

Mr. Li’s death comes seven months after he stepped down as premier under Xi, a position that he held for a decade that made him the No. 2 leader until he was replaced by a Xi loyalist.

A practical technocrat and free-market advocate, Mr. Li was seen as a potential counterweight to Xi’s increasingly ideological vision for managing the country, but his influence as premier was ultimately limited.

“Li Keqiang had power to deal with Xi Jinping, but he didn’t use it. When Xi Jinping became strong, he just retreated,” said Wu Guoguang, a scholar at Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, who worked with reformist premier Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s.

Li was considered a rising star and was a protégé of former Chairman Hu Jintao who was in charge from 2003 to 2013. Hu’s approach was much more open to free markets and less ideological. Xi has gone in a very different direction, promoting himself as a leader central to China’s future and clamping down on wealthy individuals and anyone critical of his government.

You may recall that Hu himself was unceremoniously removed from China’s 20th Party Congress last October. The removal was never explained but seemed like a public humiliation and an implied rejection by Xi of Hu’s approach.

Given the backstory here, it’s probably not surprising that China’s online censors were quick to clamp down on some of the heartfelt mourning of Li Keqiang and the kind of relative openness he represented.

Among many Chinese, Mr. Li’s death produced a swell of nostalgia for what he represented: a time of greater economic possibility and openness to private business. The reaction was jarring and showed the dissatisfaction in China with the leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s hard-line leader who grabbed an unprecedented third term in office last year after maneuvering to have the longstanding limit of two terms abolished.

The most widely shared posts are short videos of Mr. Li promising that China’s door to the outside world would remain open: “Just like the Yangtze River and the Yellow River can’t flow backward.” Some of the videos were deleted later or couldn’t be shared after China’s censorship impulse kicked in…

Quite a few business owners and investors shared photos of themselves with Mr. Li, who was a champion for entrepreneurship and innovation, when he visited their companies. They reminisced about the government encouraging new products and new business models, calling those the golden days of the entrepreneurship. “He left us suddenly,” wrote an internet businessman surnamed Ding. “And he took the golden age with him.”…

Some people expressed their gratitude for Mr. Li’s honesty when, at a news conference in 2020, he noted that China might be the world’s second biggest economy, but there were 600 million people with a monthly income of $150. It was viewed as poking a hole in Mr. Xi’s claim of beating poverty.

Of course everything is relative, but in China Li was much more pro-free market and pro-government honesty than Xi, so of course he was pushed out as Xi moved to consolidate his power. The BBC reports his death probably means even less moderation of Xi’s communist impulses in the near future.

He was the only incumbent top official who didn’t belong to Mr Xi’s loyalists group.

“Li’s death means the loss of a prominent moderating voice within the senior levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with no one apparently being able to take over the mantle,” Ian Chong, non resident scholar at the Carnegie China think tank told the BBC.

“This probably means even less restraint on Mr Xi’s exercise of power and authority.”

News of Li’s death appears to have been downplayed. State media ran Xi’s meeting with Gov. Gavin Newsom as the top story instead.