Senior party leaders to pay respects to Mao's fallen heir
Family and friends will hold a four-day mourning service starting today at a military hospital for former party leader Hua Guofeng , who died on Wednesday, aged 87.
The service will be held at the 305 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army - a medical enclave reserved for elite politicians - in Beijing. It will be open to the public, according to a source close to the family.
Senior Communist Party leaders will attend today's session, the source said without elaborating.
The relatively transparent handling of a political figure who was once publicly criticised signalled the current leadership's growing confidence in its grip on power, analysts said.
Most of the mainland's major newspapers yesterday published the one-sentence statement issued by Xinhua announcing his death, the deliberate wording of which indicated that he was regarded as an undistinguished transitional figure within the party.
The official verdict on Hua - who was Mao Zedong's anointed successor and at one point China's most powerful man, simultaneously holding top positions in the party, the government and the military - was made in 1981 in an important party resolution.
