Former Premier Li Keqiang, China's top economic official for a decade, died Friday of a heart attack. He was 68. Li was China's No. 2 leader from 2013 to earlier this year and an advocate for private business but was left with little authority after President Xi Jinping made himself the most powerful Chinese leader in decades and tightened control over the economy and society, the AP reports. State media said Li had been resting in Shanghai recently and had a heart attack on Thursday. Li, an English-speaking economist, was considered a contender to succeed then-Communist Party leader Hu Jintao in 2013 but was passed over in favor of Xi. Reversing the Hu era's consensus-oriented leadership, Xi centralized powers in his own hands, leaving Li and others on the party's ruling seven-member Standing Committee with little influence.
Li, a former vice premier, took office in 2013 as the ruling party faced growing warnings the construction and export booms that propelled the previous decade's double-digit growth were running out of steam. As the top economic official, Li promised to improve conditions for entrepreneurs who generate jobs and wealth. But the ruling party under Xi increased the dominance of state industry and tightened control over tech and other industries. Foreign companies said they felt unwelcome after Xi and other leaders called for economic self-reliance, expanded an anti-spying law and raided offices of consulting firms.
Li, who oversaw China's response to COVID-19, was dropped from the Standing Committee at a party congress in October 2022 and left office in March 2023, despite being two years below the informal retirement age of 70. The same day, Xi awarded himself a third five-year term as party leader, discarding a tradition under which his predecessors stepped down after 10 years. Xi filled the top party ranks with loyalists, ending the era of consensus leadership and possibly making himself leader for life. The No. 2 slot was filled by Li Qiang, the party secretary for Shanghai, who lacked Li Keqiang's national-level experience and later told reporters that his job was to do whatever Xi decided.
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Li was born July 1, 1955, in the eastern province of Anhui and by 1976 was ruling party secretary of a commune there. Studying law at Peking University, he was the campus secretary of the ruling party's Communist Youth League. As governor and later party secretary of populous Henan province in central China from 1998 to 2004, he showed political skills but little zeal for reform. He earned the nickname "Three Fires Li" and a reputation for bad luck after three fatal fires struck Henan while he was there. A Christmas Day blaze at a nightclub in 2000 killed 309 people. Other officials were punished but Li emerged unscathed. (More Li Keqiang stories.)
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