In mourning for leader the party wants to forget

The public security forces try to give the impression this is just another street on just another day. Apart from the police car at each end of the narrow alley, the half-a-dozen or so agents all loiter around in plainclothes.

No 6 Fuqiang Alley is a modest, grey-bricked courtyard house of a type once the standard abode for millions of Beijingers. It is located in a warren of hutong alleys, not the sort of place where you would wander by accident. So the steady trickle of people making their way up the alley are all here for a reason - though nobody says why.

The mourners are coming to remember a man that the government wants everyone to forget. That man is Zhao Ziyang, one of the most important and controversial Chinese leaders of the past 20 years. In terms of his public existence in China the 85-year-old former premier has been dead since 1989, when he was purged for sympathising with student protesters in Tiananmen Square and for allegedly trying to split the party.

Almost all of the final years of his life were spent inside No 6 Fuqiang Alley, which was reportedly guarded around the clock and shut from the outside with a bicycle lock. Today the mourning ritual is so unostentatious it might easily be mistaken for that of a much-loved teacher or factory worker.

When a foreign or otherwise undesirable mourner tries to enter the home the security agents quickly form a human barrier and shepherd their charge back up and out of the alley for questioning by uniformed officers.

Other visitors have more freedom to offer their condolences. The guards stand aside respectfully for one clearly well-connected mourner, who is chauffeured to the door in a gleaming black limousine. But an elderly woman and her daughter, both dressed in black, are only permitted to hand over their bouquet of white chrysanthemums, the traditional flower of mourning.

There is no sign of the bereaved family, although pictures have been smuggled out and posted on the internet, showing them in traditional black attire, with black bands on their left arms, standing in front of a black-framed photograph of the deceased. The clock in the red-curtained mourning parlour has been stopped at 7:01am, the time of their loved one's death.

While he was alive there were just enough perks for Zhao - the odd round of golf, visits from grandchildren, and outings to the funerals of fallen comrades - plus the vestigial loyalty to ensure he never spoke out against the party that silenced him.

But he was a prisoner all the same. The books left on his shelf, which included the recent autobiography of Bill Clinton and a banned critique of the appalling conditions of millions of Chinese peasants, suggest that, right until the last, he kept his political edge.

News of his death was carefully censored. There was no TV, no radio and mass deletions of memorial messages posted on website chatrooms.

A few terse lines buried on the inside pages of a handful of local newspapers are so far the only public recognition of the passing of a man who, as premier of the nation and general secretary of the Communist party, played a leading role in the reforms that paved the way for China's spectacular economic growth.

How Zhao will be laid to rest remains unclear. Traditionally, Beijingers place the dead between sheets of yellow and white silk, then put a gold sycee in the deceased's mouth or hand, before taking the body for cremation. Burials are forbidden in all but the most exceptional cases.

But Zhao may yet receive the honours due to a respected cadre. His family and the government are now in talks about a posthumous political rehabilitation - a commemorative ceremony, an official eulogy and possibly a burial at the Babaoshan cemetery for revolutionary heroes.

But for now Zhao's body lies not in state, but under guard off the quiet old alleyway that was his home and prison, a home that has now become his mourning parlour.