The daughter of Mao Zedong’s personal secretary is boycotting her father’s funeral, which she says is taking place against his wishes in a cemetery reserved for high-ranking revolutionary figures.

According to Nanyang Li, her father Li Rui will be interred in the Babaoshan cemetery on Wednesday in an official ceremony at which the Chinese Communist Party flag will be draped over his casket.

The official funeral is not what Li, who had lost faith in the Chinese Communist party, would have wanted, his daughter said.

Li died on Saturday in a hospital in Beijing from organ failure. His death marks the end of a generation of revolutionaries who joined the party out of commitment to socialist ideals and pushed for reforms. Li was elevated, imprisoned, banished and rehabilitated by the party he joined as a young activist in 1937.

Nanyang said she first spoke with her father about his wishes for his burial in 2008 and again last April at the time of his 100th birthday.

“I asked him the exact same question: do you want to go to Babaoshan? Do you want a formal funeral and your body to be covered by the [Chinese Communist party] flag?’” she told the Guardian.

“He paused a long long time, thinking, then he very clearly said: ‘I should go back to my hometown and be buried near my parents because I left home so early and never took care of my mother.’”

Asked about a flag on his casket, Li said: “The red colour is a bad colour. You see it on TV. Now, everything is red, red, red.”

Nanyang, who lives in the US, said she would not be attending the funeral in protest.

Zhang Lifan, an independent historian based in Beijing who knew Li, said people such as Li “are becoming history. There are fewer of them left. The reformers, the liberals are withering”.

Born in 1917 in the southern province of Hunan, Li was an activist from a young age, leading protests against local warlords. In university, he joined a Communist-organised student movement against the Japanese occupation. In 1937, he joined Mao and his soldiers in Yanan in north-western China.

By the late 1950s, Li was handpicked by Mao to be one of his personal secretaries. He was purged after he criticised Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy, the collectivision of agricultural production that led to mass famine and the deaths of up to 60 million people.

During the Cultural Revolution, a period of violent political purges across the country, Li spent almost nine years in prison. He ran in place and practised qigong to stay healthy and sane. In 1978, after Mao’s death, he was allowed back into the party, and remained a member until his death.

Li, whose name Rui means sharp, voiced his views in articles, books and interviews. Li believed in constitutionalism and consistently called on the Chinese government to come to a reckoning with its history, including the violent crackdown on student protesters in 1989.

“Whenever there’s a clash between the party and humanity. I insist on humanity,” he told the BBC in an interview in 2017.

Even in his later years, he spoke fast and would quickly point out flaws in other’s arguments, according to Zhang.

“Li Rui keenly understood the governing party’s problems. As a party insider, he knew the party’s history, current situation, and he saw its future. In his last moments, I think he gave up and held no more hope for the party. That’s why he doesn’t want the funeral, the party’s flag, and the Babaoshan cemetery,” Zhang said.

Li leaves behind a complicated legacy. As a veteran cadre, he lived in a block for retired senior Communist officials in Beijing, evidence of his privilege. He received privileged medical treatment on account of his status, according to his daughter.

Yet, state media did not report his death widely. Articles and comments commemorating him appeared to have been censored.

Nanyang believes her father lost hope in the party when the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, removed term limits last year, potentially allowing him to stay in power indefinitely. In one of his final interviews, given to Voice of America last year, he agreed with a turn of phrase circulating at the time: “Mao’s mistakes are not corrected and Xi accumulates his evil.”

Li went beyond criticism of strong leaders like Mao to indicting the Communist system as a whole. He told the Guardian in 2005: “Mao was too autocratic. He couldn’t bear to hear disagreements … But Mao’s problem is also a problem of the system. It was caused by the party system.”

According to a diary entry in 2006, Li described the party in a poem: “Arrogant, self-proclaiming, without law or morality, without knowledge, without shame.”

After Li was treated in hospital last March, his health worsened. In September, Nanyang had a friend bring her father a book of letters and tributes she had collected for him.

It was not clear whether Li understood the gift. As he flipped through the pages of the book, he repeated one sentence: zhegedang zenmeban, “What will come of this party? What will come of this party?”