More than a hundred people gathered to commemorate the 10th death anniversary of China's former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang on Saturday despite strict police surveillance that accompanied the remembrance.

The mourners brought flowers and bowed low before the photographs of the former leader inside his courtyard house in Beijing where he spent his remaining years under house arrest until he died in 2005.

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The police were stationed outside the compound as it allowed the people to enter his house and pay their respects but denied entry to journalists who wanted to cover the impromptu ceremony.

Zhao was China's third Premier from 1980-1987 and General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1987-1989.

His economic reform policies and his opposition to the use of force to end the student leaders' protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 placed him at odds with members of the party leadership including Premier Li Peng.

In the aftermath of the events, Zhao was purged politically and was placed under house arrest in 1989 until his death from a stroke in 2005 in Beijing.

The former Premier was not given the funeral rites generally accorded to senior Chinese officials after he politically fell from grace in 1989.

Bao Tong, former adviser of Zhao, said that China's current leaders at at a loss on how to deal with the former leader's legacy.

He said that Chinese officials were worried that if they did not allow Zhao's followers to remember him, they would be criticized by the Chinese people and media.

On the other hand, they were also afraid that if they did allow the public and mourners to remember him, the people would question them why they decided to force him to step down and placed him  in house arrest.

Zhao became the favorite of China's former supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, when the latter was looking for somebody who will reform the economy and open China to the outside world.

But Zhao fell from political grace after he opposed the violent response of the Chinese leadership to the student demonstrations that swept China in 1989.

Deep divisions within  the Party surfaced after hundreds of thousands of students in Beijing and across China  peacefully demonstrated, calling for democratic reforms.

Zhao's stance was to offer conciliatory efforts toward the demonstrators but he was outnumbered by the rest of the members of the Communist Party who wanted to bring in the Army to thwart the protests.

Hundreds of students died in the Tiananmen Square in a crackdown authorized by Chinese authorities which, later on, would be branded by Zhao as a tragedy.

TagsZhao Ziyang, Tiananmen Square