Li Keqiang, the economist and prime minister sidelined by Xi Jinping, has died
Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang died of a heart attack on Friday, just seven months after retiring from a decade-long tenure as prime minister and the author of many of China's economic reforms. He was only 68 years old.
Once considered a major contender for Communist Party leadership, Li has been sidelined in recent years by President Xi Jinping, who has tightened his grip on power and steered the world's second-largest economy in a more statist direction. Despite this, until seven months ago, he remained in his position as prime minister.
An internationally recognized economist dedicated to politics
The elite economist Li had advocated a more open market economy, advocating supply-side reforms, with considerable bureaucratic and operational relief, in an approach dubbed “Likonomics” that was never fully implemented.
Furthermore, he was a practical and skeptical person who, for example, did not trust the official findings of state bodies on the GDP; had created a very dynamic empirical indicator to capture economic growth that combined measurements of energy production with those of rail freight traffic and bank loans to measure the activity of the various Chinese provinces.
Ultimately, he had to bow to Xi's preference for greater state control over the economy, and his former power base lost influence as Xi installed his acolytes into positions of power.
“Comrade Li Keqiang, while resting in Shanghai for the past few days, suffered a sudden heart attack on October 26, and after all attempts to resuscitate him failed, he died in Shanghai at ten minutes past midnight on October 27,” he said. state broadcaster CCTV reported. reported.
An official obituary published Friday by state media Xinhua called his death a “huge loss for the party and the nation,” describing him as an “outstanding leader.”
“We must turn our pain into strength, learn from his revolutionary spirit, noble character and refined style,” Xinhua said.
The obituary listed his political achievements and said four times that Li had done his job under Xi's "strong leadership."
Laying a wreath in August 2022 in front of a statue of Deng Xiaoping – the leader who brought transformative reforms to China's economy – Li promised: “Reforms and opening-up will not stop. The Yangtze and the Yellow River will not reverse course.”
Video clips of the speech, which went viral but were later censored by Chinese social media, were widely seen as a coded criticism of Xi's policies.
Li also sparked debate over poverty and income inequality in 2020 when he said 600 million people in the increasingly wealthy nation earned less than $140 a month.
His death marks the end of a liberal evolution of the Chinese economy that leaves room for tight state control, but which fails to resolve many of the contradictions of enormous China.
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The article Li Keqiang, the economist and prime minister sidelined by Xi Jinping, dies comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/morto-li-keqiang-leconomista-e-primo-ministro-messo-da-parte-da-xi-jinping/ on Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:51:10 +0000.