Li Keqiang

Early Life: Rural Fengyang and Peking University

Li Keqiang, whose ancestral home was Dingyuan, Anhui, was born in Hefei, Anhui, on 3 July 1955. From 1962 to 1974 he attended Nanmen Primary School and No. 8 Middle School in Hefei, joining the Communist Youth League in December 1973. From March 1974 he was sent down to Dongling brigade of Damiao commune in Fengyang county, Anhui. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in May 1976 and from November 1976 to March 1978 served as Party branch secretary of Damiao brigade.

In March 1978, as part of the first cohort admitted after the national university entrance examination was restored, he entered the Law Department of Peking University, graduating in February 1982; he was a leader of the university student union.

The Communist Youth League (1982–1998)

From February 1982 Li served successively as secretary of the Peking University Youth League committee; member of the League Central Committee standing committee, head of its schools department and secretary-general of the All-China Students' Federation; and alternate secretary, then secretary, of the League Central Committee secretariat, concurrently vice-chairman of the All-China Youth Federation and director of the National Young Pioneers Work Committee. From March 1993 he was first secretary of the League Central Committee secretariat and president of the China Youth University of Political Studies, and a member of the Standing Committee of the Eighth National People's Congress. The official obituary published by Xinhua credits him with promoting programmes such as Project Hope and the Youth Volunteers.

While working at the League, he studied economics part-time at Peking University, earning master's and doctoral degrees. According to a 2013 report in the Beijing News, he completed his master's thesis, "Rural Industrialisation: Choices in Structural Transformation", in 1988 under the economist Xiao Zhuoji; in 1991 he published "On the Ternary Structure of China's Economy", which argued that China would have to pass through a period in which agriculture, rural industry and urban industry coexisted, and which won the Sun Yefang Prize in Economic Science for papers.

Henan and Liaoning (1998–2007)

In June 1998 Li was transferred to Henan as deputy Party secretary and acting governor, subsequently serving as governor, as Party secretary and governor, and as Party secretary and chairman of the provincial People's Congress standing committee, while also commanding the Yellow River flood-control headquarters. The official obituary credits him with setting the goal of the "Rise of Central China" and an "east-in, west-out" strategy of drawing technology from the east and opening markets in the west. In December 2004 he became Party secretary of Liaoning, later also chairing the provincial People's Congress standing committee, and promoted the "five points, one line" coastal economic belt and the redevelopment of large shanty-town districts.

A US embassy cable made public by WikiLeaks in December 2010 recorded that in 2007, at a dinner in Beijing with US Ambassador Clark Randt, Li, then Party secretary of Liaoning, said GDP figures were "man-made" and therefore unreliable; to gauge the province's economy he looked at three figures — electricity consumption, rail cargo volume and bank lending — and all other figures, especially GDP statistics, were "for reference only". According to AFP, China's foreign ministry declined to comment on individual cables concerning China. The three indicators later came to be called the "Li Keqiang index" in foreign media.

Vice-Premier and Premier (2007–2023)

In October 2007 Li was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee at the First Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee, ranked seventh, immediately after Xi Jinping. In March 2008 he became Vice-Premier of the State Council, in charge of the State Council's day-to-day work and responsible for development and reform, finance, land and resources, environmental protection, construction and health, while also heading bodies including the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project Construction Committee, the leading group on deepening medical and health-care reform and the Food Safety Commission. After the Wenchuan earthquake in May 2008 he inspected the disaster area in Sichuan.

Re-elected to the Standing Committee at the First Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee in November 2012, he was appointed Premier of the State Council by the First Session of the 12th National People's Congress on 15 March 2013. The Xinhua obituary lists among the work of his tenure supply-side structural reform, the "Internet Plus" initiative, pilot free trade zones in Shanghai and other provinces, the Belt and Road Initiative, and his "three-point pledge" on government conduct. He was elected to the Standing Committee a third time at the First Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee in October 2017 and reappointed Premier in March 2018.

After the outbreak of COVID-19, Li headed the Central Leading Group for Responding to the Epidemic and visited Wuhan on 27 January 2020 to inspect epidemic-control work. At his press conference after the Third Session of the 13th National People's Congress on 28 May 2020, he said China's per capita annual disposable income was 30,000 yuan, "but there are still some 600 million people earning a medium or low income, or even less. Their monthly income is barely 1,000 yuan. It's not even enough to rent a room in a medium Chinese city." The remark was widely discussed in China and abroad.

Retirement and Death

Li was a member of the 15th to 19th Central Committees; after the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 he no longer sat on the Central Committee or its Politburo Standing Committee. In March 2023 he stepped down as Premier and was succeeded by Li Qiang.

Li died of a sudden heart attack in Shanghai at 00:10 on 27 October 2023, aged 68. On 2 November his body was cremated at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, with Xi Jinping and other leaders attending; on the same day Xinhua published his official obituary, which described him as "an outstanding proletarian revolutionary and statesman, and an eminent leader of the Party and the state". According to the Associated Press, on the day after his death hundreds of people laid flowers near his childhood home in Hefei; some bowed and some wept.