Former Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang died this Friday in Shanghai at the age of 68 due to a heart attack. Li, who held the position for more than a decade until last March, suffered a heart attack on Thursday and "despite all efforts to save him, he died at 12:10 a.m. on October 27," according to the public channel. CCTV.
The former head of government had remained away from the political front line since he was replaced by Li Qiang in the plenary session of the National People's Congress seven months ago, at the proposal of President Xi Jinping, who was beginning his third term.
Li, belonging to the most economically liberal wing of the Communist Party, was considered a man of Hu Jintao, the previous president, who promoted him to vice prime minister of the government, a position he held for five years. As such, he was one of the strongest candidates for the presidency of China, a race which he lost to Xi Jingpin, being elevated to prime minister as a consolation prize. However, the theoretical leadership has not stopped losing weight under the presidency of Xi, China's most powerful leader since Mao.
It should be said that Li's relative economic liberalism clashed with Xi's more statist vision, which claims to be betting on a growth model that is more qualitative than quantitative and more attentive to inequalities, in contrast to the runaway growth of the previous two decades. In any case, the pandemic first and the war in Ukraine, later, cut the grass under the feet of those who, like Li, preached an increasingly diminishing role for the State. Not only in China.
The decade of his mandate was turbulent due to the trade war with the United States, a growing debt and the Covid-19 epidemic itself.
Born in 1955 in the eastern province of Anhui, Li joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1976 and rose through the ranks of the Communist Youth, until in 1998 he became China's youngest governor, heading the province. central Henan.
After occupying the leadership of the CCP in that province and then in Liaoning, Li managed to enter the Party Standing Committee in 2007 and just a year later he was promoted to vice prime minister, with Wen Jiabao as prime minister. A jurist and economist by training, fluent in English, his intellectual curiosity was recognized even by his adversaries.
The biggest stain on his resume coincided with his time in Henan, in the early 2000s, when he systematically prevented the work of journalists and humanitarian entities to clarify a major scandal of AIDS contamination in the hospital system.
Li had at times questioned the reliability of official macroeconomic statistics. He also spoke, a few years ago, of hundreds of millions of Chinese still living below the poverty line. Contrary to Li's opinion, Xi chose to end extreme poverty once and for all by resorting to systematic plans backed by enormous public funds.
A year ago, a few months before his departure, Li cryptically declared: "Chinese reforms and opening-up will continue. Neither the Yellow River nor the Yangtze River will flow backwards." The announcement of his death preceded in a few hours the long-awaited meeting in Washington between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his American counterpart Antony Blinken. Both will try to get the first meeting in a year between Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden on track in an international context of maximum tension.
Tensions, too, at the top of the Chinese government, where two of its ministers have not only been relieved without explanation - something also common in democracies - but their whereabouts have not been revealed, after several months. They are former Foreign Minister Qin Gang and former Defense Minister Li Shangfu. Two other top officials, of the Chinese ballistic program and the nuclear program, have also been dismissed, in what could be part of the campaign to moralize public life and fight against corruption that Xi Jinping preaches.
