Born: July 1st, 1955
Died: Friday, October 26th, 2023
Li Keqiang, China’s former premier, who came to power promising to improve the lot of private companies and restrain the reach of the state, but was overshadowed by the hard-line top leader, Xi Jinping, died early Friday. He was 68.
Li, who was visiting Shanghai, died from a heart attack, China Central Television, the state broadcaster, announced. “All efforts to resuscitate him failed,” its report said.
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Li, who had a doctorate in economics, exemplified a generation of highly educated Chinese leaders who rose up as Mao Zedong’s generation faded from politics. As premier, Li spoke of giving markets a greater role in the economy and he promised a fairer playing field for private companies. But, his efforts had limited success as he and his allies lost much of their influence. Xi, China’s most dominant leader in decades, instead promoted a circle of loyalists, defended a central role for state-owned enterprises and pushed for tight supervision of the economy by the ruling Communist Party.
“Li Keqiang is not really a symbol of a bygone reform era, as some are making out,” Richard McGregor, a senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, wrote in an email hours after the death was announced. “He is really a symbol of the Xi Jinping era, in which putative reformers like Li were sidelined and stripped of agency.”
An official obituary of Li issued late in the day described him as a dedicated official, loyal to Xi as he administered China’s economic policies and the government’s response to COVID-19. “We must turn grief into strength and learn from his revolutionary spirit, noble character and outstanding work style,” the obituary said, urging the country to rally around Xi.
Many Chinese social media users, who were shocked at Li’s death, saw his legacy differently. Shen Yachuan, a lawyer and former investigative journalist who uses the pen name Shi Feike, said that some Chinese, like him, would remember Li for his relatively liberal image and his advocacy of market reforms. “He may not have been a strong and forceful politician, nor a proficient public speaker,” Shen wrote in a post on WeChat. “But in my impression, almost all his public expressions were closely related to keywords such as democracy, rule of law, market economy and government streamlining.”
Li will also likely be remembered for an anecdote that gave birth to a closely watched, unofficial economic gauge. In 2007, when he was the leader of Liaoning province, in the northeast, Li privately acknowledged to the U.S. ambassador to China that Beijing’s official economic statistics were “man-made” and unreliable, according to a confidential diplomatic cable released in 2010 by WikiLeaks. He was described as having said that instead of focusing on gross domestic product, he looked at railway freight traffic, electricity consumption and the value of loans disbursed. That alternative measure of growth in China became known as the “Li Keqiang Index.”
Li stepped down as premier in March after two terms, in line with China’s constitutionally defined term limits. He could have been appointed to another senior role, but he had been effectively pushed out last October, when he was left off the lineup of the 24-member Politburo in a leadership reshuffle. His retirement into obscurity became a certainty.
Li Keqiang was born in July 1955 in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province in eastern China. He was the son of a minor Communist Party official, Li Fengsan and his wife Cao Lijun. Li was among the first students to win a place at the prestigious Peking University after China restored university entrance exams in the late 1970s, following the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of political turmoil.
He was a law student at a time of widespread intellectual ferment and his friends included democracy advocates, some of whom went into exile after the bloody June 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.
While some of his classmates headed into academia and legal work or became political dissidents, Li turned to a career in the Communist Party, joining the Youth League, which became a channel for ambitious graduates to climb into officialdom.
In 1998, when Li was 42, he was sent to Henan province in central China, becoming the nation’s youngest governor and later the province’s party leader, a more important post. Under his watch, however, a scandal erupted over the spread of HIV through the commercial sale of blood in Henan’s impoverished countryside. Li endured the fallout and in late 2004 he became the party secretary of Liaoning, an industrial province struggling with decline in its rust belt cities.
With his advanced degrees, experience in provincial government and patronage from Hu Jintao – then the head of the party, China’s most powerful post – Li was seen as a contender to succeed Hu. Instead, Xi, the “princeling” son of a Communist Party revolutionary, prevailed and was named party leader in late 2012, later becoming president as well. Li became premier, the No. 2 position in the government.
In his first remarks as premier, in 2013, Li vowed to rein in the unwieldy bureaucracy and remove obstacles to private investment. “Reforming is about curbing government power,” he said in his opening remarks, which were broadcast live on television.
But over the past decade, Xi muscled Li aside on a broad range of policy issues. Xi created a series of Communist Party commissions to make policy on issues such as national security, the economy and finance, supplanting much of the policymaking role once played by government ministries, which reported to Li as the premier.
Li never appeared to challenge Xi, at least not publicly, though he occasionally made gestures that suggested he wanted to define himself as a more moderate leader.
Now, the question is how Xi and the Communist Party will commemorate Li. Deaths of leaders in China are regarded as politically sensitive, with the potential for setting off unrest.
This is an edited version of an article which originally appeared in The New York Times.
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