
Chinese official media said that Li Keqiang, China‘s leader for ten years, has passed away from a heart attack. He has just retired at the age of 68.
Many people were optimistic about Li, the man with modest origins and economics training, when he became premier. Rather, he saw the role’s significance diminish while Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, grew in influence.
Victor Shih, a University of California, San Diego expert on elite Chinese politics, believes that Li’s death signals the end of an era.
“It just spells the end of this whole big effort to institutionalize the party,” said Shih. “He symbolized the hope of that institutionalization.”
Party officials, rattled by Mao Zedong’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, created regulations and guidelines following his death in 1976 in an attempt to avoid a repeat and prohibit anyone official from amassing undue influence or holding an unlimited term of office. Rough retirement ages were established, and unwritten routes to promotion developed. Prominent party elders also personally selected bright technocrats like Li Keqiang for promotions, according to Shih.
Li grew up following the political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in the province of Anhui. He studied law and then economics at the esteemed Peking University, one of the first classes of students to enter college after colleges reopened after the Cultural Revolution.
He conversed with student democracy campaigners there, but he made the decision to join the Communist Party in contrast to them.
Following graduation, Li worked for a number of years with the Communist Youth League, which develops new party members and functions as a network of patrons within China’s complex political structure. Li was destined for greater things, and many believe that a major factor in his ascent was his membership in the Youth League.
He began working for the government in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s, he was in charge of many provinces, including Henan in central China and Liaoning in the northeast.
At the time, Li was seen as one of the possible candidates in the so-called “fifth generation” of leaders after Mao replaced Hu Jintao as head of the Communist Party and president of China. But by 2007, observers of China knew that Xi had pushed Li aside when he and Xi were elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee.
Li became premier five years after being ranked No. 2 in the party hierarchy. Traditionally, the position included broad control over the cabinet and the economy, but over time, Li was mostly ignored as Xi assumed responsibility for almost every facet of governance.
Li was praised in a tweet by Bert Hofman, head of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, for his dedication to development, intellectual curiosity, and deep comprehension of the Chinese economy. Li aimed to increase productivity and innovation in China’s economy.
“His thought is still very much relevant today, even though some of his agenda has been derailed in the past ten years,” tweeted Hofman on X, the former Twitter platform, after meeting Li while the latter was employed in Liaoning province.
Li wrote a piece for Bloomberg that was published in January 2017. He stated that the government was “engaging the market with a lighter, more balanced touch.” Additionally, he stated that the government was opening up new economic sectors and implementing policies to facilitate doing business in China.
With varying degrees of success, Li attempted to reduce taxes and bureaucratic red tape while in government.
But Shih claimed that he was an adept implementer of Xi’s programs and that he had a solid grasp of how things were done in the Chinese government.
As his term came to an end and the effects of COVID were becoming increasingly apparent on the economy, Li made an effort to allay worries.
“China will keep opening up. “The Yangtze and Yellow rivers will not flow in the opposite direction,” Li declared in August 2022 while visiting Shenzhen in the south of the country.
He has served two five-year terms until resigning in March of this year.
According to state media, he passed away while on a vacation to Shanghai. “All efforts to resuscitate him failed,” it read.
Online, many in China expressed astonishment at Li’s passing. The country is currently dealing with a weak economy, strained relations with the West, and uncertainty about Xi Jinping’s leadership in the wake of the unexpected removal of two cabinet ministers in recent weeks.
“This is difficult to believe, so hard to bear, and it is with great sorrow that I mourn Premier Keqiang,” stated a single post.