Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, 68, has died of a heart attack after being sidelined by President Xi.
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| Li Keqiang |
After a decade in power during which his reformist star waned, former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang died of a heart attack on Friday. He was 68.
Li was once considered a leading candidate for leadership of the Communist Party, but he has fallen to the wayside as President Xi Jinping has consolidated his position and moved the world's second-largest economy in a more statist path.
The prominent economist advocated supply-side changes in an open market economy, a strategy known as "Likonomics" that was never completely implemented.
In the end, he had to give in to Xi's demand for further state control, and his previous power base withered as Xi promoted his own followers to high posts.
"Comrade Li Keqiang, while resting in Shanghai in recent days, experienced a sudden heart attack on 26 October and after all-out efforts to revive him failed, died in Shanghai at ten minutes past midnight on 27 October," state-run television station CCTV said.
There was an outpouring of sadness and disbelief on Chinese social media, and several government websites went black and white as an official gesture of mourning. The "like" button on the Chinese microblogging service Weibo has been replaced with a chrysanthemum-shaped "mourn" emblem.
Li served as premier and leader of China's cabinet for ten years under Xi till he resigned from politics in March.
Li said that "Reform and opening up will not stop" when he laid a wreath in August 2022 at a monument of Deng Xiaoping, the man who introduced revolutionary economic reform to China. There will be no U-turn for the Yangtze or the Yellow River.
The speech was generally seen as a veiled critique of Xi's policies, and video recordings of it went viral before being removed from Chinese social media.
In 2020, Li said that 600 million individuals in China earned less than the equivalent of $140 per month, sparking discussion on poverty and economic inequality.
Some members of China's intellectual and liberal elite reacted to the death of a symbol of the country's liberal economic reform with shock and dismay on a semi-private WeChat channel, with some claiming that the event marked the end of an era.
Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist at the Australian National University, predicted that "Li will probably be remembered as an advocate for the freer market and for the have-nots." "But most of all, he will be remembered for what could have been."
Professor Alfred Wu of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy observed, "All these types of people no longer exist anymore in Chinese politics."
Li's premiership was less consequential than that of Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao. I quote Wu. What more could he have done if he hadn't been benched? Constraints imposed by Xi made things difficult for him.
Li was "a premier who stood powerless as China took a sharp turn away from reform and opening," as defined by Adam Ni, an independent China political expert.
A song named "Sorry it wasn't you" was brought up by several social media users, an obvious allusion to Xi. The song was banned when it went popular around the time of former President Jiang Zemin's death in November of last year.
Xi has little incentive to offend Li's comrades, so he will likely follow party tradition and take the lead in public grieving for Li.
and party members, whose already dwindling influence in politics has taken a major hit with his passing, according to Neil Thomas, a fellow in Chinese politics at the Center for China Analysis at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Li's father was an official, and the family lived in the impoverished agricultural region of Anhui province in eastern China, therefore Li spent most of his childhood working in the fields.
Li made friends with other legal students at Peking University who were passionate about democracy and who would later confront the ruling party.
An accomplished English speaker, the self-assured young man was swept up in the intellectual and political upheaval of Deng's reform era. Pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square were put down by the military in 1989, marking the end of that era.
After finishing college, he joined the Communist Party's Youth League, a stepping stone to reformist positions of power.
While earning his master's degree in law and his doctorate in economics from Professor Li Yining, a prominent proponent of market reforms, he progressed through the ranks of the Youth League.
His time as a provincial head in Henan, an impoverished and unruly rural area in central China, was tainted by allegations of corruption retaliating harshly in the wake of the AIDS scandal. He previously led the party in Liaoning, an industrial province in China's rustbelt that is trying to attract investment and transform itself into a cutting-edge manufacturing hub.
Former President Hu Jintao, whose political movement was partially founded on the Youth League, was Li's patron. In 2012, when Xi became party chairman, he began measures to divide the Youth League.
His wife, an English professor at the Capital University of Economics and Business, and their daughter survive him.