Chinese leaders will hold a low-key, closed commemoration today to honour Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded former party secretary whose death in 1989 triggered a mass uprising against the ruling communists in Beijing.

The ceremony is ostensibly to mark the 90th anniversary of Hu’s birth, but his role in promoting political reform and the subsequent brutal suppression of the 1989 demonstrations has given the event a sharpened political edge.