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Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang died from an attack at the center at the age of 68.
State media reported that he had died at 10:00 a. m. on Friday, despite “all efforts” to resuscitate him.
Li was once considered the country’s long-term leader, but he has been surpassed by President Xi Jinping.
An economist by training, he held the second-highest position in China and in recent years has remained largely isolated among China’s most level-headed executives.
He was the only serving high-ranking civil servant who did not belong to M. Xi.
“Li stood out as a pragmatic leader and encouraged economic reforms. . . Sadly, his voice was well silenced, then overthrown and replaced by a Xi loyalist last year,” said James M. Zimmerman, a Beijing-based political commentator, in an article. in X.
“His passing is a significant loss for moderate voices within the party leadership. “
Li Keqiang: The Life of China’s Marginalized Premier
Xi Jinping’s rise to power and its importance
Li, who had resigned as premier in March this year, suffered a sudden seizure in the center on Thursday and died early Friday while in Shanghai.
His death is widely mourned on Chinese social media, with many expressing shock and grief, though comments on many posts appear to have been restricted.
“It’s too sudden, it’s so young,” said one user on Chinese social media site Weibo. Another called his death a waste of “a pillar of our house. “
But his death was largely downplayed in state media. No official text offering the party’s assessment of Li’s career was provided concisely via Xinhua news outlet.
By comparison, when former Premier Li Peng died, he was hailed as an “excellent Party member, an unflinching and proven communist soldier, and a remarkable proletarian revolutionary, statesman, and leader of the Party and State. “
The deaths of former Chinese leaders have sparked protests in the past. The great mourning of Jiang Zemin’s death last year was seen as a sophisticated complaint by President Xi.
Hiding Xi Jinping’s Dissent and Jiang’s Nostalgia
Li is known as one of the smartest political figures of his generation. He accepted into Peking University’s prestigious Law School shortly after universities reopened after Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which millions of people are believed to have died.
It is best known outside China by the Li Keqiang index, a term coined by The Economist as an informal measure of China’s economic progress.
Li came from a circle of modest relatives and the son of a local official. He was born in July 1955 in Dingyuan County, Anhui Province, eastern China.
He rose through the ranks, became China’s youngest provincial governor, and then earned a position in the upper echelon of the party’s central leadership, the Politburo Standing Committee.
At one point, the hypothesis circulated that he was preparing to succeed Mr. Xi, Hu Jintao.
He was widely seen as a protégé of Mr. Hu, the last member appointed by the Hu leadership to remain on the Politburo Standing Committee before resigning in March this year. The Hu years were seen as an era of openness to the global outdoors and greater tolerance for new ideas.
Li is known for being pragmatic in his economic policies, emphasizing narrowing the wealth gap and offering affordable housing.
“He was an outspoken and very enthusiastic guy who went out of his way to move China forward and facilitate an open discussion with other people from all walks of life,” Bert Hofguy, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
In a Party ruled by engineers, he is an economist known for “telling it like it is,” publicly acknowledging China’s economic turmoil as a way to find solutions.
His economic policy of structural reform and debt reduction, known as “Likonomics,” aimed to make China dependent on debt-driven expansion and steer the economy toward self-sufficiency.
But in 2016, articles in the party’s newspaper, the People’s Daily, abandoned “Likonomics” in favor of Xi, who carried out microeconomic reforms and advocated supply-side changes.
The end of Li’s tenure was bogged down in China’s zero-Covid crisis.
At the height of the crisis, he warned that the economy was under great pressure and called on officials to be careful not to allow restrictions to destroy growth. He even gave the impression of being unmasked in public before China lifted its zero-Covid policy.
But when executives had to choose between his order to protect the economy and Xi’s to maintain zero Covid with extreme discipline, there was no party: China doubled down on restrictions.
Zero-Covid has hit China’s economy hard, strangling chains and shutting down businesses from Shanghai’s economic hub to rural cities.
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