The reform-minded bureaucrat was once considered the country’s future leader, but has been overshadowed by current president China on a war footing”>Xi Jinping.
Li Keqiang suffered a heart attack and died in Shanghai just after midnight on Thursday, state news agency Xinhua reported.
China’s foreign ministry said on Friday it was deeply saddened by the death of the former premier, Beijing’s first public comment on the matter.
“We deeply mourn the tragic death of Comrade Li Keqiang, caused by a sudden heart attack,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular news conference, adding that “an obituary will be announced soon.”
During his 10 years as premier under Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang has developed an image of a more modern Communist Party loyalist compared to his more conservative colleagues. The official, who spoke fluent English, supported economic reforms during his tenure.
The sudden death of former Li Keqiang has shocked many people in the country, who are paying their respects to him on social networks.
On the Chinese platform Weibo, a hashtag related to his death gained more than 1 billion views in just a few hours. views. Reports of Li Keqiang’s death had the like button turned into a sunflower, a common funeral flower in China, with many users commenting “rest in peace”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed his condolences on Li Keqiang’s death, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
The Japanese embassy in China expressed its condolences on Weibo. It said that Li Keqiang visited Japan in 2018 and played an important role in the relations between the two countries.
“Power itself is still more important”
He was the son of a minor party official in eastern China, in the impoverished province of Anhui. During the tumultuous Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, Li Keqiang was sent to the countryside to do manual labor.
He later obtained a law degree from Peking University. According to fellow students, there the future prime minister became interested in Western and liberal political theory, he translated a book on law by a British judge.
However, after joining the ranks of officials in the mid-1980s, his modern approach began to fade.
Li Keqiang eventually became the top official of the ruling Communist Party in Henan province and Liaoning region in the northeast, both of which saw economic growth.
But his reputation was damaged by his handling of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which arose from an infected blood donation program while he was party leader in Henan.
Local authorities have cracked down on activists and the media instead of holding the officials responsible accountable. A number of scandals in the health sector under the leadership of Li Keqiang also arose at the national level.
He was later promoted to become the deputy of then Premier Wen Jiabao.
His attempts to address China’s deep economic problems have been limited by the overwhelming authority of Xi Jinping, with whom he was once seen as a rival for the country’s leadership.
Li Keqiang has been praised for helping the country weather the global financial crisis with relative ease, but under his leadership China’s government has undergone a dramatic shift from the consensus-based rule associated with former leader Hu Jintao and his predecessors to the more autocratic rule of Xi Jinping. .
“People have always debated whether (Chinese) institutions (…) will define outcomes, not just power as such,” 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 power itself is still more important.”
Li Keqiang was expelled from the Standing Committee at the party congress last October, even though he had not yet reached the unofficial retirement age of 70.
He resigned in March, and Li Qiang, who has been a friend of Xi Jinping since his time in the provincial government, took the premiership.
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