President Xi Jinping eventually overshadowed reform-minded bureaucrat Li Keqiang, the former premier of China, who passed away on Friday. He was sixty-eight.
He suffered a heart attack on Thursday and died in Shanghai shortly after midnight, according to Xinhua, the official news agency.
Li built a reputation as a more contemporary Communist Party supporter during his ten years as premier under Xi, setting him apart from his more rigid comrades.
During his tenure in government, the English-speaking professional bureaucrat expressed his endorsement of economic changes.
Li, a poor guy from the poor region of Anhui in eastern China and the son of a low party member, was assigned to labor in the countryside as a manual laborer during the turbulent Cultural Revolution that lasted from 1966 to 1976.
After graduating from Peking University with a law degree, his peers claim he adopted liberal and Western political ideology while translating a British judge’s book on the subject.
However, after entering the official system in the middle of the 1980s and serving as a bureaucrat in 1989 when his former classmates demonstrated in Tiananmen Square, he turned more traditional.
Li rose to become the ruling Communist Party’s top official in Henan province, and in Liaoning in the northeast — both of which saw economic growth.
But his reputation was damaged by his handling of an HIV/AIDS epidemic stemming from a tainted blood donation programme while he was party boss in Henan.
Local authorities responded with a clampdown on activists and the media rather than assigning responsibility to the officials involved, and at the national level a stream of health scandals also happened on his watch.
Later, Li was promoted to become a deputy to then-premier Wen Jiabao.
His attempts at tackling China’s deep economic challenges were curtailed by the overwhelming authority of Xi, with whom he was once seen as a rival for the country’s leadership.
Praised for helping to steer the country through the global financial crisis relatively unscathed, his time in office saw a dramatic shift in power in China from the more consensus-based rule associated with former leader Hu Jintao and his predecessors, to the more concentrated power of Xi.
“People always debated whether (China’s) institutions would… determine the outcomes, as opposed to just raw power,” Victor Shih, an expert on China’s elite politics at the University of California San Diego, told AFP.
“And of course, recent events show that raw power still matters more.”
