Deng Xiaoping’s top aide in Chinese army, Wang Ruilin, dies aged 88
- Wang worked for China’s paramount leader off and on for decades, and shared his roller-coaster ride through the Cultural Revolution
- Funeral ceremony to be held on Monday in Beijing, sources say
Wang Ruilin, the top military aide to China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 88, according to people close to the matter.
“General Wang Ruilin, former deputy head of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Political Department, passed away at the PLA’s General Hospital in Beijing on Saturday morning,” said a source close to the military, adding that a funeral service would be held on Monday at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in the Chinese capital.
Several of China’s senior officials are expected to attend the funeral or send wreaths, the person said.
Wang’s death was confirmed by two other sources, one of whom said he had known the once powerful military man personally.
“Wang was Deng’s secretary from before the Cultural Revolution [1966-76],” the person said. “He wielded huge power in Deng’s heyday during the 1980s, when every single senior leader who wanted to see Deng had to go through Wang.”
Even Zhao Ziyang, a former general secretary of China’s ruling Communist Party who was sacked after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and died in 2005 while under house arrest, said in his memoir Prisoner of the State that Wang stopped him from seeing Deng in the days leading up to the June 4 crackdown.
