Former Chinese premier Li Keqiang dies aged 68

China’s Communist Party has praised former premier Li Keqiang as an “outstanding leader of party and state” following his sudden death from a heart attack on Friday at the age of 68, seven months after he left office. A fluent English speaker who championed the role of private enterprise in the Chinese economy, Mr Li was a key figure in Beijing’s relationship with the European Union as he sought to strengthen ties after Donald Trump imposed trade sanctions on China in 2018.

“Li’s life was a revolutionary, hard-working and glorious one, and one that was dedicated to wholeheartedly serving the people and the communist cause,” his Communist Party obituary said, adding that his death caused a great loss to the party and the state.

The obituary praised Mr Li’s role in advancing economic reforms but he was widely seen as losing influence towards the end of his premiership as Xi Jinping put a greater emphasis on national security and building China’s military power. During the coronavirus pandemic, Mr Li urged local officials to balance economic growth with the need to control the virus, warning about the consequences of allowing the economy to slide.

The son of a party official, Mr Li was born in the eastern province of Anhui and was sent to work in the fields as an “educated youth” during the Cultural Revolution before going to Peking University to study law. He became interested in British constitutional law and helped to translate Lord Denning’s The Due Process of Law into Chinese.

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After his law degree, he earned a doctorate in economics and began to work his way up through the party as a member of the Communist Youth League, benefiting from the patronage of Mr Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao. Mr Li was tipped by some as a successor to Mr Hu but he lost out to Mr Xi, becoming premier with responsibility for the economy.

He led efforts to reduce the huge debt burdens created by the stimulus programmes that helped China to avoid the worst effects of the global financial crash of 2008. But his attempt at a managed deflation of the property sector helped to crash the market, driving some of China’s biggest private developers to the brink of bankruptcy.

Mr Li was seen by the business community and foreign investors as their best ally in the Chinese leadership and the European Chamber of Commerce in China said it was deeply saddened by his death. There was an outpouring of grief on Chinese social media following news of Mr Li’s death but the official obituary stressed his close association with Mr Xi.

It described the former premier as an excellent party member, “a time-tested and loyal communist soldier and an outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the Party and the state”.

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2023