Li Keqiang Lived and Died in Xi Jinping’s Shadow

Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang died early Friday morning, according to a Chinese government statement. Li had suffered a sudden heart attack the day before while “resting” in Shanghai following his retirement last October.

From 2012 to 2022, Li was nominally the second-most powerful man in China. In practice, though, he was entirely eclipsed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Li’s legacy will be judged largely in the shadow of Xi’s.

Unlike Xi, the child of a major Chinese Communist Party (CCP) figure, Li was born into obscurity. Born in 1955 to a county-level official in the poverty-stricken province of Anhui, his education was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Rather than attending university after graduating high school in 1974, he was one of the millions of young people who were “sent down to the countryside” as part of a policy to reduce the urban population and forcibly indoctrinate supposedly privileged urban youth. Li was sent to a different part of Anhui for several years to work as a laborer.

Li was part of the generation of students who entered higher education in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, attending Peking University, one of China’s top schools, after triumphing in entrance exams. He was fiercely intelligent, but he also had his eye set on leadership from the start. Fellow students, some of whom went on to become dissidents, remembered him as whip-smart but also cautious, unwilling to risk his own career through a clumsy word. Some saw him as “very idealistic, very ambitious,” while others noted that he didn’t even drink alcohol or sing because “his aim was the very top.”

He was clearly marked for a high role from an early age, adopted as a bright young technocrat by the generation of leaders above him. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he built his career through a mixture of work in the Communist Youth League—whose graduates, including later Chinese President Hu Jintao, formed a loose political faction known as the tuanpai—and economic scholarship, returning to Peking University to finish his Ph.D. in economics. Unlike many Chinese political leaders, he wrote his dissertation himself, and it won prizes.

By 1998, he was China’s youngest-ever provincial governor, taking over the large, poor, and disaster-prone Henan province. He helped boost economic growth there, but he also covered up a scandal where HIV spread through illegal blood banks, arresting activists and silencing whistleblowers. In 2004, he became party secretary—a more important role than governor—of the northeastern province of Liaoning. He was seen as a protégé of both Hu and Wen Jiabao, Hu’s premier.

Li’s wife, Cheng Hong, is a university professor specializing in American literature. She also translated the book of classic British political sitcom Yes Minister into Chinese in 1991. The show’s themes of bureaucratic frustration and official arrogance made it a hit in the country. Like many of China’s leaders, the couple’s daughter was sent to university in the United States.

Li spoke good English himself, unlike Xi, even translating a book on constitutional law as a student. And before becoming premier, Li was quite popular with foreign diplomats. That produced one of his most famous moments, which led the Economist to create the so-called Li Keqiang index, an unofficial but useful method of assessing China’s economic performance. In 2007, while party boss of Liaoning, Li told the U.S. ambassador to China at the time that China’s economic figures were deeply unreliable and described the methods he used to try to get accurate information.

Rather than trusting official data on GDP, he said, he looked at numbers that were harder or less likely to be faked, such as freight and electricity usage, and dispatched his own staff to investigate the situation on the ground. A U.S. account of the discussion was published in leaked diplomatic cables in 2010, stirring interest in Li’s candor and insight.

There was speculation in the early 2000s that Li might even succeed Hu in the country’s top job. But after the 17th Party Congress in 2007, when Li was made the top vice premier to Wen, it seemed much more likely that he would be the second man to Xi. At the time, “collective leadership” prevailed, and the idea seems to have been that Xi’s ideological correctness and political skills would be matched by Li’s pragmatic reformism. Some foreign analysts hoped for “Likonomics,” a program of broad economic change.

Very soon after Xi came to power, it became clear that he was in a position of unprecedented strength—and for Chinese officials, political pragmatism is more important than the economic version. For Li, with Xi so clearly ascendant and other top leaders being purged all around him, that largely meant staying quiet.

Other premiers, following the model of Mao Zedong’s much-loved sidekick Zhou Enlai, had built a reputation for relative candor or for showing a public compassion the party leader couldn’t. There was none of that from Li, though, who was deeply sidelined as Xi’s new personality cult grew. Li tried to cut taxes and reduce bureaucracy, and he played a role in China’s successful handling of a potential financial crisis in 2018, but he was otherwise a forgotten premier, drifting behind Xi.

Occasionally, Li hinted that he was trying to keep the cause of economic reform alive. At an event honoring Deng Xiaoping last year, Li promised that “reform and opening up”—Deng’s signature policy—would endure, telling a small crowd in an impromptu speech that “the Yellow and Yangtze rivers cannot reverse course.” The speech was given in Shenzhen, a key part of Deng’s 1992 Southern Tour, where he reasserted his power against conservative efforts to roll back reform. But Deng at that time was sitting at the top of the system on a network of power and connections built over decades; Li, despite his nominal status, was out on his own.

Early 2022 saw a brief resurgence of optimism about Li’s power, as he took a more prominent role in setting policy amid a growing economic crisis and the calamities of unpopular COVID-19 lockdowns. There were pronouncements that Likonomics was back and claims that he might keep his position as premier under Xi following the leadership reshuffle in October. But even at the time, these were thin hopes. In public appearances, Li trailed behind Xi.

After the 20th Party Congress in 2022, it was clear that the destruction of the reformers was complete. The tuanpai was annihilated as a faction, and Li was shuffled out of office. Most cruelly, Li’s former mentor, Hu, was publicly humiliated by Xi. Escorted out by security officials, Hu paused to say a few words to Xi—and then patted Li on the shoulder.

Li’s sudden death has sparked conspiracy theories, coming as it does amid yet another wave of purges by Xi. China’s urban elite is already deeply on edge as the economy slowly crumbles, fearing that the country is slipping backward into even more political repression. It’s relatively rare for top CCP leaders, who have a dedicated medical unit for their health, to die under the age of 70. But 68-year-old men do die of heart attacks. Official media seemed taken aback by the suddenness of his death, with a very brief notice coming out before the full obituary was issued eight hours later.

Li is being moderately celebrated online by Chinese who miss the possibilities of a more open country. It seems extremely unlikely, however, that his death will produce anything like the grief and rage once sparked by the deaths of other figures such as Zhou. One sardonic note was rapidly removed by censors; the posting of Fish Leong’s song “I Wish It Wasn’t You,” taken as a reference to hopes that Xi could have suffered Li’s fate instead.

In death, Li remains as overshadowed by Xi as he was in life. As of publication, official news sites such as the People’s Daily and Xinhua relegated his death to a thin headline beneath talk of Xi’s latest accomplishments, if they mentioned it at all. His official obituary repeats the phrase “with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core” four times and ends with a paragraph of Xi’s political cliches. At the very end, it throws in a token “Comrade Li Keqiang will live forever!” Even metaphorically, that seems unlikely.