Li Keqiang, the former Chinese premier, has died unexpectedly at the age of 68 — months after retirement following a career in which he was outmanoeuvred and marginalised by Xi Jinping, the country’s all-powerful president.
According to state media, Li died in the early hours of Friday after abruptly falling ill on Thursday evening.
“Comrade Li Keqiang, while resting in Shanghai in recent days, experienced a sudden heart attack on October 26 and, after all-out efforts to revive him failed, died in Shanghai at ten minutes past midnight,” the state broadcaster CCTV reported.
By the standards of senior Chinese politicians, he was relatively young — his two predecessors, Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao, survive him at the ages of 95 and 81 respectively. There is no evidence of any suspicious circumstances, although some China analysts report rumours in the country that Li was assassinated.
Li was an economist who rose to the senior levels of the Chinese Communist Party and was regarded as a potential successor to the previous president, Hu Jintao. He pushed for an opening up of China’s economy to private companies.
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However, the top job went to Xi, a leader who has centralised decision-making and taken more personal control of the government. He favours state influence over the economy at the expense of “Likonomics”, as Li’s doctrine was known. Officially, the premier is the second most important figure in the leadership, but Li became the weakest holder of the post for several decades.
The deaths of senior leaders have in the past been the trigger for political unrest in China, including the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which began as expressions of mourning for Hu Yaobang, a relatively liberal CCP leader.
“The passing of a senior Chinese political figure can be a complicated and challenging moment for the leadership,” said Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington. “The timing of Li’s death is not good for the leadership. Some people already think it was an assassination, while others will likely conclude that Li’s death was somehow related to disappointment with how Xi treated him or the general direction of the country.”
Li was a fluent speaker of English who, among other achievements, translated into Chinese the work of the British judge Baron Denning.
