Former premier Li Keqiang, China’s top economic official for a decade, has died aged 68
Li Keqiang, China’s former premier and a top economic official for a decade, has died of a heart attack. He was 68. (Oct. 27)
BEIJING – Former premier Li Keqiang, China’s top economic official for a decade, died of a heart attack on Friday. He was 68.
Li was China’s second-largest leader and champion of the private sector from 2013 to 2023. However, after President Xi Jinping became the most powerful Chinese leader in decades and tightened control over the economy and society, he was left with little authority.
CCTV said Li was recently resting in Shanghai and suffered a heart attack on Thursday. He died at 12:10 a.m. on Friday.
Li, an English-speaking economist, was considered a candidate to succeed then-Communist Party leader Hu Jintao in 2013 but was passed over in favor of Xi. Xi reversed the consensus-oriented leadership of the Hu era and centralized power in his own hands, leaving Li and others on the party’s ruling seven-member Standing Committee with little influence.
As the top economic official, Li promised to improve conditions for entrepreneurs who create jobs and wealth. But Xi’s ruling party increased the dominance of state-owned industries and tightened control over technology and other industries. Foreign companies said they felt unwelcome after Xi and other leaders called for economic self-reliance, expanded an anti-espionage law and raided consulting firm offices.
Li was removed from the Standing Committee at a party conference in October 2022, despite being two years below the informal retirement age of 70.
On the same day, Xi appointed himself party leader for the third time for five years, breaking the tradition of his predecessors stepping down after 10 years. Xi filled the party’s top positions with loyalists, ending the era of consensus leadership and potentially making himself leader for life. Second place went to Li Qiang, the party secretary for Shanghai, who lacked Li Keqiang’s national-level experience and later told reporters that it was his job to do whatever Xi decided.
Li Keqiang, a former vice premier, took office in 2013 as the ruling party faced increasing warnings that the construction and export boom that drove double-digit growth over the past decade was losing momentum.
Government advisers argued that Beijing needs to promote growth based on domestic consumption and service industries. This would require opening up more state-dominated industries and forcing state banks to grant more loans to entrepreneurs.
Li’s predecessor, Wen Jiabao, apologized at a press conference in March 2012 for not moving quickly enough.
In a speech in 2010, Li acknowledged challenges including an overreliance on investment to drive economic growth, weak consumer spending and a wealth gap between wealthy cities in the east and poor rural areas home to 800 million people.
Li was seen as a possible candidate to revive then-Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s market-oriented reforms that sparked China’s boom. But he was known for his calm style, rather than the driving impatience of Zhu Rongji, the premier from 1998 to 2003 who sparked the construction and export boom by pushing through painful reforms that cut millions of jobs in state-owned industries.
Li is said to have supported the 2012 China 2030 report released by the World Bank and a Cabinet research body, which called for dramatic changes to reduce the dominance of state-owned industries and rely more on market forces.
The Unirule Institute, an independent think tank in Beijing, said the state-owned industry was so inefficient that its return on equity – a general measure of profitability – was negative 6%. Unirule was later shut down by Xi as part of a campaign to tighten information controls.
In his first annual policy speech in 2014, Li was praised for promising to push forward market-oriented reforms, reduce government waste, clean up air pollution and stamp out pervasive corruption that undermines public trust in the ruling party.
Xi stripped Li of decision-making powers on economic issues by appointing himself head of a party commission to oversee reforms.
Xi’s government continued its anti-corruption campaign, detaining hundreds of officials, including former Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang. But party leaders were ambivalent about the economy. They have failed to deliver on a promised list of dozens of market-oriented changes. They increased the dominance of state-owned banks and energy and other companies.
Xi’s government opened some industries, including electric car manufacturing, to private and foreign competition. But it built state-run “national champions” and encouraged Chinese companies to use domestic suppliers instead of imports.
Borrowing by businesses, households and local governments increased, driving up debt levels that economists had already warned were dangerously high.
In 2020, Beijing finally tightened controls on debt in the real estate sector, one of China’s largest economic sectors. That triggered a collapse in economic growth, which fell to 3% in 2022, the second lowest level in three decades.
As governor and later party secretary of the populous Henan province in central China from 1998 to 2004, Li showed his political skills but little zeal for reform.
Li earned the nickname “Three Fires Li” and a reputation for bringing bad luck after Henan was hit by three deadly fires during his stay there. A Christmas Day fire at a nightclub killed 309 people in 2000. Other officers were punished, but Li was unharmed.
Meanwhile, provincial leaders tried to suppress information about the spread of AIDS through a blood-buying industry in Henan.
Li’s reputation as an unlucky man endured as China suffered a series of deadly disasters during his time in office.
A few days after he took office, a landslide on March 29, 2013 killed at least 66 miners at a gold mine in Tibet and left 17 others missing and presumed dead.
A chemical warehouse exploded in the eastern port of Tianjin on August 12, 2015, killing at least 116 people.
On March 22, 2022, a China Eastern Airlines plane crashed into the ground, killing all 132 people on board. Authorities have not yet announced a possible cause.
Li oversaw China’s response to COVID-19, whose first cases were discovered in the central city of Wuhan. Unprecedented controls were imposed at the time, blocking most international travel for three years and blocking access to major cities for weeks.
In one of his last major official acts, Li chaired a Cabinet meeting where it was announced on November 11, 2022 that anti-virus controls would be relaxed to reduce disruptions after the economy contracted 2.6% in the second quarter of the year. Two weeks later, the government announced that most travel and business restrictions would end the following month.
Li was born on July 1, 1955 in the eastern province of Anhui and was the ruling party secretary of a municipality there in 1976.
He studied law at Peking University and was campus secretary of the ruling party’s Communist Youth League, an organization that launched the political careers of former party leaders Hu Jintao and Hu Yaobang. He was a member of the league’s Standing Committee, a sign that he was viewed as a future leader.
After holding a number of party positions, Li received his Ph.D. In 1994, he graduated from Peking University with a degree in economics.
After Henan, Li served as party secretary for Liaoning Province in the northeast as part of a rotation through provincial offices and ministries in Beijing designed to prepare leaders. He joined the party’s central committee in 2007.
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Leung reported from Hong Kong. Former AP correspondent Joe McDonald, who retired earlier this year, was the lead author of this obituary.