Late Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang can be laid to rest - a decade after death
Approval given for burial 10 years after the late leader's death but there's still no concrete plan on a final resting place, family says
The family of late liberal Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang said on Sunday they had finally received approval for the burial of his ashes, a decade after his death.
"They [the authorities] have agreed to have them buried together," Zhao's son-in-law Wang Zhihua said, referring to the late leader and his wife Liang Boqi , who died in late 2013.
Zhao was purged for opposing the military crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement and died on January 17, 2005.
His ashes have been kept at his former courtyard home in Beijing because there was previously no agreement with the government on a burial site.
At the time of his death, the party, which determines burial arrangements for its members, offered to inter his ashes at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery but his family wanted him to be buried privately because they were worried about future access to his ashes.
His funeral in 2005 was a sensitive event as the authorities feared it could spark large-scale mourning. On the day of his funeral, police and security agents were posted on every corner along Changan Avenue, Beijing's main thoroughfare, and many of his supporters were barred from the ceremony.