Li Keqiang, former Chinese prime minister, died this Friday in Shanghai after suffering a heart attack the previous day, state press announced. He was 68 years old—young by the death standards of the communist hierarchy—and had held the position for the last decade, coinciding with Xi Jinping’s first 10 years in power. He was considered a defender of the reform and economic opening policies initiated in the Deng Xiaoping era, but his figure was undermined by Xi’s omnipresence and increasing concentration of power. He is remembered as one of the heads of the Executive with the least capacity for maneuver in recent decades.
In March of this year, Li ended his second five-year term as chief executive and was replaced by Li Qiang, Xi’s trusted man. His death also marks the virtual death of what was one of the most powerful political factions of the Chinese Communist Party, the Youth League.
Born in Hefei, Anhui Province, and 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 after, he entered Peking University, one of the most prestigious in the country, where he enrolled in Party political activities and graduated in Law. After graduating, he joined the Communist Youth League, where he met the country’s future president and Party general secretary, Hu Jintao, then leader of the League.
He expanded his studies in economics and climbed the ladder of power, holding provincial positions of increasing relevance. Hu Jintao, who led the country in the decade before Xi Jinping, would be his great supporter. In 2007, under Hu’s presidency, Li was named as one of seven members of the standing committee of the Politburo, the apex of China’s power pyramid. There was speculation that he would be the man called to succeed Hu at the top, until Xi’s name emerged more strongly: in 2012, he would be promoted to the general secretary of the party, and to the presidency in 2013, while Li was relegated to the position of prime minister, secondary in China, and even more secondary after the reforms that Xi undertook in subsequent years.
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The last flash of complicity between Hu and what had been his dolphin, Li Keqiang, could be seen at the last congress of the Communist Party, a year ago: the day when the cadres voted for the leadership of the party – Xi Jinping was scheduled to be re-elected for an unprecedented third term—Hu was lifted from his chair next to Xi and visibly forced to leave the room of 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 a kiss of death,” says analyst Willy Lam, senior researcher at the Jamestown Foundation, who believes that with his death the Youth League faction, considered a rival to Xi’s, is left powerless and against which the Chinese president has developed a particular crusade throughout his mandate. “A couple of years after Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he was able to completely sideline Li Keqiang, and the League was in no position to oppose it. The fact that Hu Jintao was unceremoniously 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 one among the top officials “who insisted on continuing Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, but he was soon sidelined, so he did not have much influence on economic policy.”
Author Richard Mc Gregor argues in political biography Xi Jinping, the backlash (2019) that the changes introduced by the current president in the last decade have meant the “abandonment” of the reforms that Deng Xiaoping tried to introduce to leave the Mao Zedong era behind, such as “limiting the role of the Party and energizing the powers of the Government. That turn gave way to the State Council (the Chinese Executive) “weaker than in living memory,” he adds. “Li Kegiang, prime minister and, in theory, the second leader in the national hierarchy, had ceded, or had been forced to cede, numerous key functions to Xi, especially that of the main person in charge of economic policy,” describes that epoch.
Li Keqiang took office with the Chinese economy still growing at a strong rate of 7.8% in 2013; he left it in 2023 with GDP rising at one of its lowest rates in almost 50 years. His death comes at a time when, precisely, the Chinese locomotive is not starting at the expected pace, weighed down by a battered real estate sector, sluggish consumption and marked by geopolitical rivalry with the United States.
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