China's Li Keqiang: The Life and Death of a Dutiful Man

Li Keqiang, the former premier of China, second in power only to Chinese President Xi Jinping from 2013 until March 2023, died suddenly in late October from what was reported as a heart attack. Unsurprisingly, China mourned. In the eyes of some in China's leadership, however, Chinese people mourned a bit too much.

The reason? Li had a “common man’s” touch, which China’s president clearly does not. People felt that Li Keqiang was relatable, accessible, and interested in the welfare of the everyday Chinese citizen, as many reports noted.

As such, Li was seen by many Chinese as a welcome foil to Xi, who has seen the popularity he enjoyed early in his stewardship drastically wane in recent years. Chinese people appreciate a leader with a bit of style, personality, and humor, and they don't find that in Xi Jinping.

Li Keqiang, however, had a flair for spontaneous wit, and was willing to show it in the public arena.

To cite just one example: On September 20, 2016 Li gave a speech to the New York Economic Club and others. The event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel; Henry Kissinger introduced Li. After his prepared remarks, Li took questions.

Thomas Farley, then the chief operating officer of the New York Stock Exchange, wanted to ask the premier about how to counter mistrust and negative press on both sides of the China-U.S. relationship. But he prefaced his remarks by saying, “Premier Li, thank you so much for being here and thank you for having us in your hotel.”

Li replied to the following question on the issue of mistrust, and then said, “Just now you said, ‘coming to my hotel.’ But I want to make a correction here for the record. That is, as far as I know, a Chinese private company has acquired stakes in the hotel, but the hotel is under long-standing management of American businessmen. So I’m thinking that I’m still staying at an American hotel!” Laughter and applause followed.

Li's command of figures, statistics, and both macro- and microeconomic policies and issues also put him on firm footing to meet the press, usually without notes. His remarks could be provocative, however, as he was willing to let the numbers speak for themselves.

On May 28, 2020, in a video press conference held at the end of the third session of the 13th National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People, Li answered a question from the People Daily, a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, about China’s battle against poverty.

Li responded by saying, “Our country is a developing country with a big population. The per capita annual disposable income in China is 30,000 RMB. But there are still some 600 million people earning a medium or low income, or even less. Their monthly income is barely 1,000 RMB. It’s not even enough to rent a room in a medium Chinese city.”

At the time of Li's reply, 1,000 RMB equaled approximately $141.

The remark went viral in China. Many well-educated, white-collar city dwellers, especially the young, didn't believe that China still had such depth of impoverishment, much less in those numbers, representing over 40 percent of the population.

Caixin Global, a Chinese media group known for its business, finance, and investigative news reporting in China, sought to clarify and verify – or not – Li’s assertion.

Their conclusions? “The premier’s words are true.”

Caixin's report went on to say that “after analyzing a random sample of 70,000 families collected by the National Bureau of Statistics, our team at the China Institute for Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University found that nearly 42.9% of the people in the sample had a household monthly income per person of no more than 1,090 yuan in 2019.”

“If that statistic holds true nationwide, it would account for more than 599.9 million people,” Caixin noted.

The report continued, noting that the “majority of the population fall into the low- or middle-income groups… Many of them are still living on or near the bread line. They mostly remain out of sight and have few channels to make their voices heard. In that sense, they are society’s silent majority.”

Li’s remarks likely rankled Xi Jinping, who would have taken them as a personal rebuke. At the time of Li's remarks, Xi had already held the helm of China as CCP general secretary and president of the country for seven years. Xi’s stewardship of the country relies heavily on economic successes. One of the hallmarks of his rein has been much-publicized victory against “extreme poverty,” which China claims to have eradicated.

But after Li put astonishing numbers in the public eye, Xi had to face substantiated facts that flew in the face of the economic miracle that he continues to tout, as well as additional editorial barbs about a “silent majority” that “remains out of sight” and has “few channels to make their voices heard.”

Li Keqiang may not have been intentionally trying to make his boss lose face, but it’s no surprise that he was not reappointed as premier in 2023, nor did he retain his seat in the CCP's Central Committee at the 20th Party Congress in late 2022.

The degree and rapidity to which Chinese citizens came out to mourn the late premier without a doubt both startled and concerned the leadership. No one at China’s helm will have forgotten that the death of another Chinese leader, Hu Yaobang, in 1989 sparked a spontaneous outpouring of grief that led to mass demonstrations throughout the nation. Those demonstrations in Beijing ultimately led to a military crackdown, a massacre of unarmed civilians by the hundreds and probably thousands.

Hu’s position in the hearts and minds of China’s people then went deeper than Li Keqiang's now. Hu openly supported students who had demonstrated for greater freedoms, and China even before communism has always held a sentimental place in its collective heart for students.  Nonetheless, Li’s unexpected demise and the public’s response rattled Beijing. Ultimately, it is a statement on the stability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when it worries about too much public sentiment and sorrow being laid out for one of its own.

It sounds counterintuitive until one remembers that this happened in the context of Xi Jinping’s world. Even in death, Xi will have seen Li as a rival until the funeral was over and any hint of unrest or over-adulation of Li had been quelled. That seems to have happened. Xi’s particular mix of mandates requires that if anyone is ever to be missed or mourned, it cannot be more than he would be.

Indeed, on social media after Li’s death the sense of mourning seemed to be as much about a lost opportunity as the passing of a former premier. In the years leading up to the selection of a successor for CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao in late 2012, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang were seen as rivals for the top job. In many of the messages, it was easy to read a sense of “what if,” with the implicit assumption that Li could have avoided many of the pitfalls Xi had lead his country into.

Li certainly had a lot to recommend him in the run-up to the internal selection process within the CCP’s upper echelons.

Li came from a humble background, albeit somewhat ameliorated by his father’s position as a local CCP official in Anhui Province – until today still one of China's poorest provinces, and at that time desperately deprived. Whatever slight benefit the elder Li may have had as a result of his official position, it would not have made the family materially much better off than their neighbors.

Xi, by contrast, only two years older than Li, grew up in Zhongnanhai, the residential compound created from the ancient imperial garden of the Forbidden City, home to emperors for hundreds of years. Although not luxurious, it was the pinnacle of privileged spaces in China, and was Xi’s home until he was sent to the countryside to live under the crudest of conditions during the Cultural Revolution. Li faced that same fate, but for him it was not the drastic change that it had to have been for Xi.

Li was a smart, intellectually rigorous man. He went to university rather than staying within the safe confines of local CCP politics, which he could have entered with his father’s help. After graduating, Li rose meteorically through the party ranks, becoming at 43 the youngest provincial governor the CCP had ever produced. In the meantime, he took a law degree and both a master’s as well as a doctorate degree in economics from Peking University, one of China’s best academic institutions, then and now.

Films of Li’s public speeches and encounters show a man in full command of his audience and environment. He was comfortable with the limelight without necessarily needing to bask in it. By contrast, there have been numerous examples of Xi Jinping misreading Chinese characters in his pre-written speeches – episodes quickly covered up by Chinese media (in one case, to the ludicrous extent of having every other CCP official adopt the wrong pronunciation in subsequent speeches).

Ultimately, in 2012, Xi, the son of a powerful man who learned by his father’s example the means and methods of maneuvering for power in the CCP, gained the top job. Li Keqiang, the contender, may be remembered on the other hand for his singular lack of open ambition, and instead for his focus on the Chinese people’s welfare as his first and foremost responsibility.

Li was not without his faults. Leaked papers from the “Xinjiang Papers” show that he may have known about and sanctioned extra-judicial detentions of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China's Xinjiang region, and that subject deserves further inquiry.

In the end, Li Keqiang was a dutiful man who rose to power through the application of his talented intellect. The fact that he didn’t get to number one is more to his credit than not.