Crowds lined the streets leading to Babaoshan Cemetery as a funeral procession led Li Keqiang to his final rest yesterday. Frank Sieren describes how the CCP leadership and companions paid their respects. The mourning for Li found many different ways of expression in the last couple of days, from mountains of flowers outside his old home to black and white websites to chrysanthemums that replaced the “Like” button on the social media platform Weibo. However, the tributes were strictly monitored, as the leadership was too concerned about social unrest, which expressions of grief had often sparked in the past. Any praise for the former premier deemed excessive was already seen as critical and corresponding comments were censored online.
The new Silk Road, China’s colossal infrastructure initiative, is not exactly a breeding ground for eco-friendly energy and construction projects. But that is set to change, and the Belt and Road Initiative is set to become green(er). The Chinese Ministry of the Environment introduced green guidelines in 2019, with a traffic light rating system to facilitate assessment. Data from the first half of 2023, for example, are encouraging: Of the 12.3 billion dollars that flowed into energy projects between January and June, almost 56 percent financed renewables. Corresponding agreements were also signed at the BRI Forum in October. In addition, the recipient countries of the investments now often demand sustainability themselves; they do not want dirty coal-fired power plants either.
Hundreds, but not thousands, gathered near Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Thursday as former Chinese premier Li Keqiang was laid to rest. In the cemetery hall, where high-ranking officials and national heroes are laid to rest, a black banner with white characters read: “We deeply mourn the loss of Comrade Li Keqiang.” A portrait of him could be seen under the banner. Li’s body, covered with the flag of the Chinese Communist Party, was surrounded by flowers and evergreen cypress trees. A sad song played in the background.
Li Keqiang, who was known as the Premier of the People due to his grounded, practical leadership, passed away at the age of 68 on 27 October in Shanghai after suffering a heart attack – just six months after resigning from the office he had held for ten years.
At around nine in the morning, President Xi Jinping and his wife, along with the six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party, as well as Vice President Han Zheng, paid their last respects to the former premier. They bowed three times in silence, as is customary on such occasions. President Xi took the hands of Li’s wife, Heng Hong, a professor of economics, with both hands to express his condolences. He wore a white carnation on his lapel.
Li often had different political views than Xi. However, there was no sign of these disagreements at the funeral service. According to the state news agency Xinhua, former President Hu Jintao sent a wreath to express his condolences.
Hu Jintao is considered Li’s mentor from the days of the Youth League. Leading officials from the relevant central departments, Li’s friends and representatives from his hometown also paid their respects at the cemetery. Li was officially eulogized as a top member of the Chinese Communist Party, a “tested and loyal communist soldier” and an “outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the party and the state.”
The flags on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and government buildings across China were flying at half-staff. On the popular social media platform Weibo, which replaced its “Like” button with a chrysanthemum – a flower that symbolizes mourning – tens of thousands paid their respects to Li by leaving comments under a post by the Chinese state broadcaster on Thursday. Li was the top trending topic on Weibo anyway. The hashtag for his death was clicked 430 million times.
Some companies, such as Starbucks, have changed the color of their app interface to black and white in mourning for Li. Xinhua shared photos of Li on Weibo, including those of him with Xi, Hu and former leader Jiang Zemin. There were also photos of Li interacting with ordinary Chinese people in the 2000s, and one showing him climbing over rubble after a severe earthquake in Sichuan in southwest China.
Videos on social media showed large crowds on the way from Li’s funeral procession to Babaoshan Cemetery. Some shouted: “Farewell, Premier!” Or: “You have worked so hard, Premier!” Police lined the road leading to the cemetery, blocking traffic and urging people to move on, wary of the presence of unofficial or foreign media.
Public tributes to Li were strictly controlled as the government attempted to prevent a mass outburst of grief, which it considered a potential trigger of social unrest. For this reason, there were also warnings against “effusive comments.”
This reflects the fear that such phrases “offer exaggerated praise on the surface of what is actually an act of criticism,” wrote the Digital Times, a China media outlet based in California. The censors wanted to prevent effusive praise of Li from being interpreted as hidden criticism of Xi. Only harmless comments such as “Farewell” or “You will live forever” were allowed.
The death of political leaders is considered particularly sensitive in China and is associated with political unrest. The most famous example was the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 after the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang. However, Li never exerted the same fascination on masses of people as Hu did back then. And the economic situation was much more dramatic than today, with inflation of over 30 percent in 1988, low budget reserves and a large trade deficit.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a multi-billion infrastructure project: Transport corridors and power plants for oil and gas are being built with money from Beijing. However, the focus is gradually shifting – away from gigantic construction projects of Chinese state-owned companies and towards investments in joint projects with BRI partner countries. In addition, the BRI is to become greener.
President Xi Jinping named “green development” one of eight areas of cooperation in his closing speech at the recently hosted BRI Forum. Vice President Han Zheng announced that China would strengthen financing for green development and encourage companies to realize more low-emission projects in partner countries.
A demand that member countries are increasingly voicing themselves. Their populations started opposing dirty BRI projects. So, on the one hand, the aim is to make the projects cleaner. On the other hand, it is about promoting the energy transition in partner countries wishing to benefit from China’s climate technology.
Back in 2019, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and more than 40 international partners – companies, associations, think tanks and NGOs – founded the BRI International Green Development Coalition (BRIGC), which promotes environmental action and low-carbon development under the BRI. Since then, the BRIGC has issued three sets of green development guidance for BRI projects, which includes a traffic light rating system: Red for projects with a significant environmental or climate impact, yellow for those with a neutral impact. Green stands for a positive contribution.
The latest green development guidance from October 2021 recommends that “financial institutions and companies are encouraged not to add new ‘red’ projects and to phase out existing commitments to ‘red’ projects.” Shortly beforehand, Xi promised at the United Nations that China would no longer finance any new overseas coal projects.
In March 2023, four relevant ministries published a paper entitled “Opinions on the Joint Implementation of Green Development in the Belt and Road Initiative,” which authors from the environmental organization Client Earth analyzed. The paper affirms that no new coal-fired power plants will be built as part of the BRI and that “China will facilitate the full implementation of the … Paris Agreement among all parties.”
The paper also encourages participating companies to comply with international or Chinese environmental standards in BRI projects if such standards do not exist or are insufficient in the recipient countries. This is particularly true in poor or corrupt countries – and has often led to problems. These “opinions” also suggest that China could regulate the actions of its companies outside China, instead of simply “encouraging” them as it has done in the past.
The Client Earth authors expect that Chinese industry associations will publish a kind of code of conduct for their respective sectors. The BRIGC, for example, recently published a guideline for motorways and railway lines and a guide for companies and financial institutions.
The Asia Society has devised a digital toolkit for evaluating projects. Anyone can use it to ensure projects are “mutually beneficial, equitable, inclusive, and environmentally and socially sustainable” for all involved. According to Asia Society, it sometimes only takes minor adjustments to make projects more sustainable.
The trend away from fossil fuels is already evident. “China’s energy related engagement in the first half of 2023 were the greenest in any 6-month period since the BRI’s inception in 2013,” wrote green finance expert Christoph Nedopil Wang, now Director of Australia’s Griffith Asia Institute, in a July report for the Green Finance & Development Center at Shanghai’s Fudan University. According to the report, China spent 12.3 billion dollars on energy projects between January and June 2023. Almost 56 percent of this was spent on renewables – 41 percent on solar and wind power plants and 14 percent on hydropower plants.
According to Nedopil, China has stopped building new oil plants, even though there are still some investments (see chart). As promised, coal projects are also practically at zero, as confirmed by other experts. However, there are some exceptions, as some projects stretch the rules. For example, a coal-fired power plant in Indonesia was approved as part of an industrial site. Another in Pakistan was not built until the first half of 2023, but was classified as “old” because it has been under discussion since 2016. It is also unclear what will happen with coal projects that are already under construction or recently completed.
Generally speaking, the BRI has only just begun to become truly green. At the BRI Forum, the over 450 papers, agreements and projects signed included deals for renewable energy projects. Moritz Rudolf from the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale University in the US noted a series of these in a four-part thread on the BRI Forum on X.
A few examples:
In addition, several multilateral agreements on cooperation in green investments, climate adaptation and specific issues such as the conservation of mangrove forests in the ASEAN states were signed.
Independently of the plans at the BRI Forum, some projects are already underway. For instance, Uzbekistan is working with China to build photovoltaic plants in the regions of Kashkadarya and Bukhara with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts. At a summit with the five BRI partners of Central Asia in Xi’an in June, China signed construction contracts for large wind and solar plants in the region. A 600-megawatt solar park in Saudi Arabia, a solar park in South Africa and a wind farm in Namibia are also in the pipeline and under construction.
These projects belong to the “small and beautiful” projects (小儿美), a term that has been pushed since the beginning of 2023 and which Xi also used in his speech at the BRI Forum. This fits with the trend observed by Nedopil that the share of private companies in BRI projects is growing. Unlike China’s state-owned companies, they are not in a position to carry out mega projects. According to Bloomberg, Trina Solar and TCL Zhonghuan Renewable Energy Technology, for example, signed contracts for new production facilities in the Middle East at the BRI Forum.
Flowers piled up surrounding the old house of Li Keqiang’s family in Hefei, Anhui, and then spread away by hundreds of meters; beating both the scene following the death of former Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin, who passed last year, and the memorable sea of flowers for Princess Diana. Mournful bouquets also appeared in other cities in China, something not commonly seen when a Chinese politician dies.
Li’s friends and acquaintances from his university years summoned up memories of an intelligent, sharp-minded Li; Pictures and videos of an amiable Li holding conversations with ordinary citizens circulated on social media; His fans recalled his candid-sounding comments contradicting pompous statements by Xi Jinping, his nemesis and bully. But did he achieve any remarkable accomplishments during his ten years in the premier’s office? No.
He championed technological advances, spearheaded some technical reforms in the government, advocated for young people’s participation in business ventures, he pushed for administrative streamlining. But aren’t these trivial for the No. 2 person in the central leadership?
But he didn’t seem to be corrupt, and he was decent, friendly and sympathetic. That is already an image that few Chinese politicians have. So, his sudden death at a relatively young age triggered an emotional outpour from a population that has long acquired the Stockholm syndrome.
However, the lamentation is indeed not only for Li, it’s more for themselves. Many people felt they, in their respective ways, had similar experiences with Li in the past decade, struggling but achieving nothing in the end. They are unhappy with reality and desperate about the future. Li was an underdog, but in Xi’s China, who isn’t, except Xi himself?
So the mourning is also a protest in disguise. Some brave souls even wrote thinly veiled cursing messages pointing to Xi on cards attached to the bouquets. Like Li’s death, the scale of people’s reactions is also unexpected. Less than one year after the eruption of youth-led “white paper demonstrations,” Chinese people have spoken out again. This time, participants encompassed almost all age groups.
It is always difficult to gauge the real public opinion and sentiment in China. How this will evolve and when and how the next unrest comes is impossible to predict. Whatever comes next, it won’t be much relevant to Li. But it’s still worth taking a closer look at some aspects of Li’s career and personality.
Despite a brilliant academic background and outstanding administrative capabilities, he was never a bold character and had always been a defender of the regime since the beginning of his career. Right after university graduation in 1982, Li became one of the top officials in the Communist Youth League and then a close associate of the future Party chief Hu Jintao, who was back then the No. 1 of the League. During the student movement in late 1986, a precursor for the latter in 1989, Li rushed back to his alma mater, the prestigious Peking University, trying to prevent students from taking the street.
After the Tiananmen massacre, some of his peers on similar levels of party or government positions resigned after seeing the regime’s fundamental nature, Li stayed and climbed all the way up. In 2012, when Hu was about to step down as General Secretary, he advocated for Li as his successor, but other Party bosses, such as Jiang Zemin and Zeng Qinghong, favored Xi, who eventually won out.
However, in the world-famous scene in which Hu Jintao was taken away from the 20th Party Congress’ closing ceremony, Li, like the others on the stage, acted as if he didn’t see it. Even after Hu gently patted his shoulder on his way, Li just nodded slightly and uncomfortably without turning around to greet Hu.
In his tenure as the premier, Li made some eyebrow-raising and widely quoted comments, such as “600 million people living on 1000 yuan (128 euro) or less per month,” a jab into the propaganda of poverty eradication success under Xi’s leadership, and “Reform and open-up can’t be reversed, just like the Yangtze and the Yellow River won’t flow back.”
But these words don’t qualify as being truly visionary or provocative. The “Yangtze-Yellow River” comment, uplifting as it sounds, is actually nonsense, as China is evidently on a regressing track.
On the sensitive topic of political reform, Li has been generally silent. In comparison, former premier Wen Jiabao, Li’s predecessor, who appears to have a similar mild personality to Li, made some systematic comments on the topic both before and after leaving office.
Li’s sudden departure at 68 years old also triggered speculation about the cause of his death. He is reported to have died from a heart attack in Shanghai. But retired senior Chinese officials enjoy world-class luxury medical service. Deaths under 80 years are nowadays almost unheard of among these people. At the same time, Shanghai has China’s best doctors and medical facilities.
When it comes to political murder, China is no Russia. But mysterious deaths do happen, such as that of Lin Biao (1907 – 1971). Speculators also dug out the deaths of the late Premier Zhou Enlai (1898 – 1976) and veteran military leader Zhu De (1886 – 1976). Their deaths were both allegedly precipitated by Mao Zedong’s malicious intervention in their treatment.
Easy traffic access? The tenants of these houses in Guiyang live less than a meter away from the freeway – directly below it. The feeder road to the airport expressway was built in the 1990s, and homeowners were expropriated in order to make room in the densely populated city. The families who were relocated were compensated with the area under the highway.
Crowds lined the streets leading to Babaoshan Cemetery as a funeral procession led Li Keqiang to his final rest yesterday. Frank Sieren describes how the CCP leadership and companions paid their respects. The mourning for Li found many different ways of expression in the last couple of days, from mountains of flowers outside his old home to black and white websites to chrysanthemums that replaced the “Like” button on the social media platform Weibo. However, the tributes were strictly monitored, as the leadership was too concerned about social unrest, which expressions of grief had often sparked in the past. Any praise for the former premier deemed excessive was already seen as critical and corresponding comments were censored online.
The new Silk Road, China’s colossal infrastructure initiative, is not exactly a breeding ground for eco-friendly energy and construction projects. But that is set to change, and the Belt and Road Initiative is set to become green(er). The Chinese Ministry of the Environment introduced green guidelines in 2019, with a traffic light rating system to facilitate assessment. Data from the first half of 2023, for example, are encouraging: Of the 12.3 billion dollars that flowed into energy projects between January and June, almost 56 percent financed renewables. Corresponding agreements were also signed at the BRI Forum in October. In addition, the recipient countries of the investments now often demand sustainability themselves; they do not want dirty coal-fired power plants either.
Hundreds, but not thousands, gathered near Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on Thursday as former Chinese premier Li Keqiang was laid to rest. In the cemetery hall, where high-ranking officials and national heroes are laid to rest, a black banner with white characters read: “We deeply mourn the loss of Comrade Li Keqiang.” A portrait of him could be seen under the banner. Li’s body, covered with the flag of the Chinese Communist Party, was surrounded by flowers and evergreen cypress trees. A sad song played in the background.
Li Keqiang, who was known as the Premier of the People due to his grounded, practical leadership, passed away at the age of 68 on 27 October in Shanghai after suffering a heart attack – just six months after resigning from the office he had held for ten years.
At around nine in the morning, President Xi Jinping and his wife, along with the six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party, as well as Vice President Han Zheng, paid their last respects to the former premier. They bowed three times in silence, as is customary on such occasions. President Xi took the hands of Li’s wife, Heng Hong, a professor of economics, with both hands to express his condolences. He wore a white carnation on his lapel.
Li often had different political views than Xi. However, there was no sign of these disagreements at the funeral service. According to the state news agency Xinhua, former President Hu Jintao sent a wreath to express his condolences.
Hu Jintao is considered Li’s mentor from the days of the Youth League. Leading officials from the relevant central departments, Li’s friends and representatives from his hometown also paid their respects at the cemetery. Li was officially eulogized as a top member of the Chinese Communist Party, a “tested and loyal communist soldier” and an “outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the party and the state.”
The flags on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and government buildings across China were flying at half-staff. On the popular social media platform Weibo, which replaced its “Like” button with a chrysanthemum – a flower that symbolizes mourning – tens of thousands paid their respects to Li by leaving comments under a post by the Chinese state broadcaster on Thursday. Li was the top trending topic on Weibo anyway. The hashtag for his death was clicked 430 million times.
Some companies, such as Starbucks, have changed the color of their app interface to black and white in mourning for Li. Xinhua shared photos of Li on Weibo, including those of him with Xi, Hu and former leader Jiang Zemin. There were also photos of Li interacting with ordinary Chinese people in the 2000s, and one showing him climbing over rubble after a severe earthquake in Sichuan in southwest China.
Videos on social media showed large crowds on the way from Li’s funeral procession to Babaoshan Cemetery. Some shouted: “Farewell, Premier!” Or: “You have worked so hard, Premier!” Police lined the road leading to the cemetery, blocking traffic and urging people to move on, wary of the presence of unofficial or foreign media.
Public tributes to Li were strictly controlled as the government attempted to prevent a mass outburst of grief, which it considered a potential trigger of social unrest. For this reason, there were also warnings against “effusive comments.”
This reflects the fear that such phrases “offer exaggerated praise on the surface of what is actually an act of criticism,” wrote the Digital Times, a China media outlet based in California. The censors wanted to prevent effusive praise of Li from being interpreted as hidden criticism of Xi. Only harmless comments such as “Farewell” or “You will live forever” were allowed.
The death of political leaders is considered particularly sensitive in China and is associated with political unrest. The most famous example was the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 after the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang. However, Li never exerted the same fascination on masses of people as Hu did back then. And the economic situation was much more dramatic than today, with inflation of over 30 percent in 1988, low budget reserves and a large trade deficit.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a multi-billion infrastructure project: Transport corridors and power plants for oil and gas are being built with money from Beijing. However, the focus is gradually shifting – away from gigantic construction projects of Chinese state-owned companies and towards investments in joint projects with BRI partner countries. In addition, the BRI is to become greener.
President Xi Jinping named “green development” one of eight areas of cooperation in his closing speech at the recently hosted BRI Forum. Vice President Han Zheng announced that China would strengthen financing for green development and encourage companies to realize more low-emission projects in partner countries.
A demand that member countries are increasingly voicing themselves. Their populations started opposing dirty BRI projects. So, on the one hand, the aim is to make the projects cleaner. On the other hand, it is about promoting the energy transition in partner countries wishing to benefit from China’s climate technology.
Back in 2019, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and more than 40 international partners – companies, associations, think tanks and NGOs – founded the BRI International Green Development Coalition (BRIGC), which promotes environmental action and low-carbon development under the BRI. Since then, the BRIGC has issued three sets of green development guidance for BRI projects, which includes a traffic light rating system: Red for projects with a significant environmental or climate impact, yellow for those with a neutral impact. Green stands for a positive contribution.
The latest green development guidance from October 2021 recommends that “financial institutions and companies are encouraged not to add new ‘red’ projects and to phase out existing commitments to ‘red’ projects.” Shortly beforehand, Xi promised at the United Nations that China would no longer finance any new overseas coal projects.
In March 2023, four relevant ministries published a paper entitled “Opinions on the Joint Implementation of Green Development in the Belt and Road Initiative,” which authors from the environmental organization Client Earth analyzed. The paper affirms that no new coal-fired power plants will be built as part of the BRI and that “China will facilitate the full implementation of the … Paris Agreement among all parties.”
The paper also encourages participating companies to comply with international or Chinese environmental standards in BRI projects if such standards do not exist or are insufficient in the recipient countries. This is particularly true in poor or corrupt countries – and has often led to problems. These “opinions” also suggest that China could regulate the actions of its companies outside China, instead of simply “encouraging” them as it has done in the past.
The Client Earth authors expect that Chinese industry associations will publish a kind of code of conduct for their respective sectors. The BRIGC, for example, recently published a guideline for motorways and railway lines and a guide for companies and financial institutions.
The Asia Society has devised a digital toolkit for evaluating projects. Anyone can use it to ensure projects are “mutually beneficial, equitable, inclusive, and environmentally and socially sustainable” for all involved. According to Asia Society, it sometimes only takes minor adjustments to make projects more sustainable.
The trend away from fossil fuels is already evident. “China’s energy related engagement in the first half of 2023 were the greenest in any 6-month period since the BRI’s inception in 2013,” wrote green finance expert Christoph Nedopil Wang, now Director of Australia’s Griffith Asia Institute, in a July report for the Green Finance & Development Center at Shanghai’s Fudan University. According to the report, China spent 12.3 billion dollars on energy projects between January and June 2023. Almost 56 percent of this was spent on renewables – 41 percent on solar and wind power plants and 14 percent on hydropower plants.
According to Nedopil, China has stopped building new oil plants, even though there are still some investments (see chart). As promised, coal projects are also practically at zero, as confirmed by other experts. However, there are some exceptions, as some projects stretch the rules. For example, a coal-fired power plant in Indonesia was approved as part of an industrial site. Another in Pakistan was not built until the first half of 2023, but was classified as “old” because it has been under discussion since 2016. It is also unclear what will happen with coal projects that are already under construction or recently completed.
Generally speaking, the BRI has only just begun to become truly green. At the BRI Forum, the over 450 papers, agreements and projects signed included deals for renewable energy projects. Moritz Rudolf from the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale University in the US noted a series of these in a four-part thread on the BRI Forum on X.
A few examples:
In addition, several multilateral agreements on cooperation in green investments, climate adaptation and specific issues such as the conservation of mangrove forests in the ASEAN states were signed.
Independently of the plans at the BRI Forum, some projects are already underway. For instance, Uzbekistan is working with China to build photovoltaic plants in the regions of Kashkadarya and Bukhara with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts. At a summit with the five BRI partners of Central Asia in Xi’an in June, China signed construction contracts for large wind and solar plants in the region. A 600-megawatt solar park in Saudi Arabia, a solar park in South Africa and a wind farm in Namibia are also in the pipeline and under construction.
These projects belong to the “small and beautiful” projects (小儿美), a term that has been pushed since the beginning of 2023 and which Xi also used in his speech at the BRI Forum. This fits with the trend observed by Nedopil that the share of private companies in BRI projects is growing. Unlike China’s state-owned companies, they are not in a position to carry out mega projects. According to Bloomberg, Trina Solar and TCL Zhonghuan Renewable Energy Technology, for example, signed contracts for new production facilities in the Middle East at the BRI Forum.
Flowers piled up surrounding the old house of Li Keqiang’s family in Hefei, Anhui, and then spread away by hundreds of meters; beating both the scene following the death of former Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin, who passed last year, and the memorable sea of flowers for Princess Diana. Mournful bouquets also appeared in other cities in China, something not commonly seen when a Chinese politician dies.
Li’s friends and acquaintances from his university years summoned up memories of an intelligent, sharp-minded Li; Pictures and videos of an amiable Li holding conversations with ordinary citizens circulated on social media; His fans recalled his candid-sounding comments contradicting pompous statements by Xi Jinping, his nemesis and bully. But did he achieve any remarkable accomplishments during his ten years in the premier’s office? No.
He championed technological advances, spearheaded some technical reforms in the government, advocated for young people’s participation in business ventures, he pushed for administrative streamlining. But aren’t these trivial for the No. 2 person in the central leadership?
But he didn’t seem to be corrupt, and he was decent, friendly and sympathetic. That is already an image that few Chinese politicians have. So, his sudden death at a relatively young age triggered an emotional outpour from a population that has long acquired the Stockholm syndrome.
However, the lamentation is indeed not only for Li, it’s more for themselves. Many people felt they, in their respective ways, had similar experiences with Li in the past decade, struggling but achieving nothing in the end. They are unhappy with reality and desperate about the future. Li was an underdog, but in Xi’s China, who isn’t, except Xi himself?
So the mourning is also a protest in disguise. Some brave souls even wrote thinly veiled cursing messages pointing to Xi on cards attached to the bouquets. Like Li’s death, the scale of people’s reactions is also unexpected. Less than one year after the eruption of youth-led “white paper demonstrations,” Chinese people have spoken out again. This time, participants encompassed almost all age groups.
It is always difficult to gauge the real public opinion and sentiment in China. How this will evolve and when and how the next unrest comes is impossible to predict. Whatever comes next, it won’t be much relevant to Li. But it’s still worth taking a closer look at some aspects of Li’s career and personality.
Despite a brilliant academic background and outstanding administrative capabilities, he was never a bold character and had always been a defender of the regime since the beginning of his career. Right after university graduation in 1982, Li became one of the top officials in the Communist Youth League and then a close associate of the future Party chief Hu Jintao, who was back then the No. 1 of the League. During the student movement in late 1986, a precursor for the latter in 1989, Li rushed back to his alma mater, the prestigious Peking University, trying to prevent students from taking the street.
After the Tiananmen massacre, some of his peers on similar levels of party or government positions resigned after seeing the regime’s fundamental nature, Li stayed and climbed all the way up. In 2012, when Hu was about to step down as General Secretary, he advocated for Li as his successor, but other Party bosses, such as Jiang Zemin and Zeng Qinghong, favored Xi, who eventually won out.
However, in the world-famous scene in which Hu Jintao was taken away from the 20th Party Congress’ closing ceremony, Li, like the others on the stage, acted as if he didn’t see it. Even after Hu gently patted his shoulder on his way, Li just nodded slightly and uncomfortably without turning around to greet Hu.
In his tenure as the premier, Li made some eyebrow-raising and widely quoted comments, such as “600 million people living on 1000 yuan (128 euro) or less per month,” a jab into the propaganda of poverty eradication success under Xi’s leadership, and “Reform and open-up can’t be reversed, just like the Yangtze and the Yellow River won’t flow back.”
But these words don’t qualify as being truly visionary or provocative. The “Yangtze-Yellow River” comment, uplifting as it sounds, is actually nonsense, as China is evidently on a regressing track.
On the sensitive topic of political reform, Li has been generally silent. In comparison, former premier Wen Jiabao, Li’s predecessor, who appears to have a similar mild personality to Li, made some systematic comments on the topic both before and after leaving office.
Li’s sudden departure at 68 years old also triggered speculation about the cause of his death. He is reported to have died from a heart attack in Shanghai. But retired senior Chinese officials enjoy world-class luxury medical service. Deaths under 80 years are nowadays almost unheard of among these people. At the same time, Shanghai has China’s best doctors and medical facilities.
When it comes to political murder, China is no Russia. But mysterious deaths do happen, such as that of Lin Biao (1907 – 1971). Speculators also dug out the deaths of the late Premier Zhou Enlai (1898 – 1976) and veteran military leader Zhu De (1886 – 1976). Their deaths were both allegedly precipitated by Mao Zedong’s malicious intervention in their treatment.
Easy traffic access? The tenants of these houses in Guiyang live less than a meter away from the freeway – directly below it. The feeder road to the airport expressway was built in the 1990s, and homeowners were expropriated in order to make room in the densely populated city. The families who were relocated were compensated with the area under the highway.
