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.
Obituary
The arrival of two giant pandas, Yang Guang and Tian Tian, to the sound of bagpipes at Edinburgh Zoo in December 2011 was the culmination of five years of negotiation involving the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, the British ambassador to Beijing and the China Wildlife Conservation Association. Even the Princess Royal was asked to put in a word during the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
Key to the negotiation of the pandas’ 12-year residency was Li Keqiang, an English-speaking economist who as vice-premier had signed a memorandum of understanding in 2011 with Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister at the time.
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Two years later, Li emerged as No 2 to President Xi, promising a leaner, cleaner government. As if to underline his point, a dense, toxic smog stewed around the Great Hall of the People in Beijing during his first news conference, while in Shanghai’s main river 12,500 stinking pig carcasses, dumped from pig farms upstream, were rotting.
Many saw Li as a pragmatist, unencumbered by ideology, yet he claimed to believe that future economic growth should not come at the expense of China’s soil, water and air, pledging greater transparency on pollution.
Li, a bureaucrat who once ordered junior officials to speak only English at meetings, was not one of the country’s princelings but had worked his way up through the rank and file of the Communist Party. He tackled excessive spending on government buildings, banquets, overseas trips and the world’s largest fleet of official cars. While such reformist bombast was nothing new, he tried to persuade China that the incoming administration was different and ready to “walk the walk”.
As premier, Li was in effect in charge of running the Chinese economy. Almost immediately he signed a £5.6 billion trade deal with David Cameron, the pair of them having first feasted on a relatively modest banquet of bamboo fungus and sea bass. Downing Street promised the deal would lead to the direct creation of 1,500 jobs and there was talk of Chinese investment in Britain’s civil nuclear programme and the HS2 rail project, with Li presenting the British prime minister with a model Chinese bullet train.
He took the train theme to Africa, pledging to connect all the continent’s capital cities to each other. Back home, he adopted the role of comforter in chief, visiting victims of the Sichuan earthquake that killed 196 people in April 2013 and meeting survivors and families of the 173 people killed in a chemical explosion in Tianjin in 2015. He later played an active role in managing the economic and political fallout during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Li continued to pursue China’s interests overseas. “As premier, my highest priority is to pursue modernisation through urbanisation and industrialisation,” he wrote in The Times in 2014 on the eve of a visit to this country. In Whitehall, preparations for his arrival were officially described as “unusually friendly”, but behind the scenes they were anything but straightforward. Although Li was not head of state, the Chinese insisted that he should have an audience with Queen Elizabeth. It was a potential dealbreaker, with one British government source musing: “The Chinese are hard negotiators.”
Li Keqiang was born in Hefei, in the eastern province of Anhui, in 1955, the son of Li Fengsan, a local official, and Cao Lijun. As a “sent-down youth” during the cultural revolution (1966-76) Li undertook manual labour at an agricultural commune. “Personally, I do recall vividly my experience of poverty and hunger in my youth, having been sent to work as a farm boy,” he wrote.
There he joined the Communist Party, becoming head of the local production team. When Peking University reopened, he enrolled as a law student, channelling his political rise through the Communist Youth League and becoming a protégé of Hu Jintao, the future president. He was once described as a carbon copy of Hu — a reliable technocrat but not a visionary.
Li took a doctorate in economics and translated several legal works from English to Chinese, including Lord Denning’s The Due Process of Law (1980). While his former classmates were protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he kept his head down, working as a bureaucrat.
He and Cheng Hong met as students. They were married in 1983 and in 1995 she was a visiting scholar at Brown University, Rhode Island, in the US. Cheng, a professor at the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing, survives him with their daughter.
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In 1998 Li became China’s youngest provincial governor when he took the helm in Henan, a poor but heavily populated province. He ran into difficulties when thousands of rural residents were infected with HIV after government-backed clinics failed to clean needles properly, and he was blamed for administrative failings when 309 people were killed in a fire at a disco fire in Luoyang city in December 2000.
Yet Li toed the party line and in 2004 was rewarded with the industrial northeastern province of Liaoning, where he concentrated on improving transport links. He became known there for his cynical view of official economic figures, developing instead what became known as the “Li Keqiang index”, which measures electricity consumption, bank lending and rail cargo. Its existence came to light after a conversation with a US diplomat in which he complained that the province’s GDP figures were unreliable.
Once again, Li appeared not to suffer any political damage and at the 2007 party congress was elevated to the party’s central leadership. Soon afterwards he was named as vice-premier, promoting the construction of affordable housing projects and the renovation of shantytowns. He was even talked of as a leading candidate to succeed his mentor, Hu, who was by then president, but was notably ranked second to Xi.
Five years later Xi and Li came to power, with Li winning his “election” among delegates at the National People’s Congress with 99.7 per cent of the vote. His economic policy of structural reform and debt reduction, termed “Likonomics”, aimed to reduce China’s dependency on debt-fuelled growth.
Although re-elected in 2018, Li was increasingly sidelined by Xi. His task of economic management was now entrusted to Liu He, a Harvard-educated economist and the new vice-premier. He was also absent from a symposium attended by economic experts and top party leaders in August 2020 to prepare for China’s 14th five-year plan. Meanwhile, Xi put himself in charge of key policymaking bodies including the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission.
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Last year Xi won an unprecedented third term as general secretary, overturning China’s two-term limit. Li, however, was excluded from the list of the party’s new 205-member Central Committee from which the ruling Politburo Standing Committee is picked, bringing to an end the career of a leader who behind the scenes might have challenged Xi, leaving many China observers wondering: “What if…?”
During that year’s usually well-choreographed party congress, Hu was unexpectedly escorted off stage on Xi’s orders. As he left, Hu tapped Li on the shoulder in a friendly gesture and the outgoing premier nodded back.
Yet still Li showed no outward display of disloyalty. “No matter how the international winds and clouds change, China will unswervingly expand its opening up,” he declared at his last news conference seven months ago. “The Yangtze River and the Yellow River will not flow backwards.”
Meanwhile, the two giant pandas at Edinburgh Zoo are packing their bamboo suitcases and preparing to return to China in December.
Li Keqiang, Chinese politician, was born on July 1, 1955. He died of a heart attack on October 27, 2023, aged 68
