Li Keqiang, former Chinese prime minister, died this Friday in Shanghai after suffering a heart attack the day before, the state press announced. He was 68 years old – young by the communist hierarchy’s death standards – and had held the position for the past decade, coinciding with Xi Jinping’s first decade in power. He was seen as an advocate of the reform and economic opening policies initiated in the Deng Xiaoping era, but his figure was jibarized after Xi’s omnipresence and increasing concentration of power. He is considered one of the heads of the executive branch with the least maneuverability in recent decades.
In March this year, Li ended his second five-year term as chief executive and was replaced by Li Qiang, Xi’s confidant. His death also effectively marks the death of one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most powerful political factions, the Youth League.
Xi Jinping greets Li Keqiang during the National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing in March 2023. POOL (via Portal)
Born in Hefei, Anhui Province, the son of a local communist official, his education was interrupted during the turbulent Cultural Revolution when he was sent to work in a commune. He joined the party in 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death. Shortly thereafter, he attended Peking University, one of the most prestigious in the country, where he enrolled in party political activities and completed his law degree. After graduating, he joined the Communist Youth League, where he met the country’s future president and party general secretary, Hu Jintao, the league’s leader at the time.
He expanded his studies in economics and climbed the ladder of power, holding provincial positions of increasing importance. Hu Jintao, who ruled the country in the decade before Xi Jinping, would be his big supporter. In 2007, under Hu’s presidency, Li was appointed one of seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the top of China’s power pyramid. There was speculation that he would be the man appointed to succeed Hu at the top until Xi’s name became more prominent: he would be promoted to general secretary of the party in 2012 and president in 2013, while Li was relegated to the post Prime Minister, second in rank in China and even second in rank after the reforms that Xi implemented in the following years.
Li Keqiang and Barack Obama, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2015. Jorge Silva (Portal)
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The last hint of complicity between Hu and his former dolphin Li Keqiang was seen at the last Communist Party congress a year ago: the day the cadres voted to lead the party – re-electing Xi Jinping to an unprecedented third term – Hu was lifted from his chair next to Xi and visibly forced to leave the Great Hall of the People. As he was led out of the room, Hu placed his palm on Li Keqiang’s shoulder. This one barely moved.
“Like a kiss of death”
“It was like the kiss of death,” says analyst Willy Lam, senior researcher at the Jamestown Foundation, who believes his death leaves the Youth League faction, seen as rivals to Xi and against which the Chinese president is developing, powerless has a special crusade throughout his term. “A few years after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he managed to completely eliminate Li Keqiang, and the League was unable to resist. The fact that Hu Jintao was summarily expelled and removed from the Great Hall of the People shows that he is no longer a force to be reckoned with.” As prime minister, Lam adds, Li was the only top official “who insisted on this “To continue Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, but he was soon sidelined, so he did not have much influence on economic policy.”
Li Keqiang greets Fidel Castro during a visit to Havana, Cuba, September 25, 2016. Handout. (Portal)
Author Richard Mc Gregor argues in the political biography Xi Jinping, the backlash (2019) that the changes introduced by the current president over the last decade amounted to the “abolition” of the reforms that Deng Xiaoping tried to introduce to put the era behind him by Mao Zedong, such as “limiting the role of the party and strengthening the powers of the government”. This turnaround left the State Council (China’s executive branch) “weaker than ever before,” he adds. “Li Kegiang, prime minister and theoretically the second leader of the national hierarchy, had ceded or had to cede numerous key functions to Xi, especially that of the main person responsible for economic policy,” he describes the era.
Li Keqiang took office while the Chinese economy was still growing at a strong rate of 7.8% in 2013; left it in 2023 with GDP growth at one of the lowest rates in almost 50 years. His death comes at a time when the Chinese locomotive is not running at the expected pace, weighed down by a struggling real estate sector, sluggish consumption and characterized by geopolitical rivalry with the United States.
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