Chinese President Xi Jinping (R, front) shakes hands with a family member of Wan Li, former chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, during Wan's funeral at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, capital of China, July 22, 2015.(Photo: Xinhua/Ju Peng)
The body of Wan Li, former chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, was cremated on Wednesday morning in Beijing.
President Xi Jinping, premier Li Keqiang, former president Hu Jintao, and senior leaders Zhang Dejiang, Liu Yunshan, Wang Qishan and Zhang Gaoli, attended the funeral at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.
They gave their respects to Wan, and offered his family their condolences.
Wan died at the age of 99 in Beijing on July 15.
He was chairman of the NPC Standing Committee from 1988 to 1993, and he also served as secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and vice premier prior to being the top legislator.
Wan's official obituary praised him as an "excellent Party member, a time-tested and loyal communist soldier, and an outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the Party and the state."
Born in 1916 in Shandong, Wan joined the CPC in 1936. He made an important contribution to defending China against Japanese invaders in Hebei, Shandong and Henan provinces, and he was a leading figure in the War of Liberation.
After the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Wan assumed a number of positions, including head of the urban construction ministry and deputy mayor of Beijing.
He suffered serious persecution during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but resumed work in 1973 and became a senior Party official of the Beijing municipal CPC committee and later railways minister.
In 1977, he became the local Party chief in east China's Anhui Province, where he supported the contractual household responsibility system -- a practice once deemed illegal but secretly used by farmers to resist the egalitarian agricultural system and raise grain production.
These efforts helped lay a new path for rural reform, said an official document released on Wednesday. It hailed the rural reform Wan led in Anhui as a "major breakthrough in the rural economic system, and an arduous and successful trial for the socialist economic system".
Wan's leadership of rural reform was recognized by both local farmers and the CPC Central Committee. Farmers in Anhui came up with the quip "Wanna have rice for dinner? Go find Wan Li."
Late leader Deng Xiaoping once said China's reform originated in the countryside and that Wan should take credit for it.
Wan became secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, and vice premier in charge of agriculture, forestry, water conservation and labor in 1980.
From 1982 to 1986, he led the drafting of five No. 1 Central Documents, annual policy document drawn up by the CPC and the central government.
They facilitated China's rural reform, and Wan proposed institutionalizing the contractual household responsibility system by means of writing it into the Constitution.
Wan was also a major figure in economic reform, promoting change in political, science, educational, and cultural sectors.
He stressed respect for the "Law of Value", developing a commodity economy and a merit-based distribution system as opposed to planned economy and egalitarian distribution practices.
According to the official document, Wan also called for reform of the political system, urging democratic and scientific policymaking.
Wan took the position of chairman of the NPC Standing Committee in 1988.
He positioned improving socialist democracy as the legislature's core mission and urged institutionalization and legalization of socialist democratic politics through step-by-step reform.
He led the drafting of an amendment to China's Constitution that was eventually passed by the top legislature in March 1993. In the same month, Wan retired from his top legislature post.
