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Li Peng (born 20 October 1928) was the fourth Premier of the People's Republic of China, between 1987 and 1998, and the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislative body, from 1998 to 2003.

For much of the 1990s Li was ranked second in the Communist Party of China (CPC) hierarchy behind then General Secretary Jiang Zemin. He retained his seat on the Politburo Standing Committee until 2002.

As Premier, Li was the most visible representative of China's government who backed the use of force to quell the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Li also advocated for a largely conservative approach with Chinese economic reform, which placed him at odds with former Premier Zhao Ziyang, who fell out of favour after 1989.

As Premier, Li oversaw a rapidly growing economy, and attempted to decentralize and downsize the Chinese bureaucracy, to varying degrees of success. He was also at the helm of the controversial Three Gorges Dam project.

Personal background

Li was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, the son of writer Li Shuoxun, one of the earliest CPC revolutionaries. Li was orphaned at age three when his father was executed by the Kuomintang for treason and for support of armed splittism. He became the adopted son of Zhou Enlai, famed in China as the strong supporter and disciple of Mao Zedong. As a seventeen year old in 1945, Li joined the Chinese Communist Party.

Rise to power

Like other Communist Party cadres of the third generation, Li gained a technical background. In 1941 he began studying at the Institute of Natural Science (the former Beijing Institute of Technology) in Yan'an. In 1948, he was sent to study at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, majoring in hydroelectric engineering. During the period he was chairman of the Chinese Students Association in the Soviet Union. A year later, Zhou Enlai became Premier of the newly declared People's Republic of China. Li survived the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution unscathed, primarily due to his family contacts in powerful Communist circles.

Li advanced politically, becoming deputy minister of the state power industry in 1979 and then minister in 1981. Between 1979 and 1983, he served as vice-minister and minister of Power Industry and secretary of the Party Group of the Ministry of Power Industry, and vice-minister and deputy secretary of the Party group of the Ministry of Water Resources and Power.

After Li was elected member of the CPC Central Committee at the Twelfth CPC National Congress in 1982, he rose to the Politburo and the Party Secretariat in 1985, and the standing committee of the Politburo in 1987, when he also became acting premier. Beginning in 1983, Li Peng served as vice-premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. Beginning in 1985, he served concurrently as minister in charge of the State Education Commission.

While in this position, political dissent as well as social problems like inflation, urban migration and school overcrowding became even greater problems in China. Despite these acute challenges, Li shifted his focus from the day-to-day concerns of the energy, communications and raw materials departments, instead to the forefront of the inter-party debate on the pace of market reforms, opposing the modern economic reforms pioneered by Zhao Ziyang throughout Zhao's years of public service. While students and intellectuals urged greater reforms, some party elders increasingly feared that the instability opened up by any significant reforms threatened to undermine the authority of the Communist Party, the central focus of Li's career.

Premiership

Hu Yaobang, a protégé of Deng Xiaoping and a leading advocate of reform, was blamed by the Communist Party for allowing a series of national student-led protests and forced to resign as CPC General Secretary in January 1987. Premier Zhao Ziyang was made General Secretary and Li Peng, former Vice Premier and Minister of Electric Power and Water Conservancy, was made Premier of the People's Republic of China.

After Zhao became General Secretary of China, his proposals in May 1988 to expand free enterprise led to popular complaints (which some suggest were politically inspired) about inflation fears and gave opponents of rapid reform the opening to call for greater centralization of economic controls and stricter prohibitions against Western influence, especially opposing further expansion of Zhao's more free enterprise-oriented approach. This precipitated a political debate, which grew more heated through the winter of 1988-1989.

The death of Hu Yaobang on 15 April 1989, coupled with continuing economic hardship and high inflation, provided the backdrop for the largescale protest movement of 1989 by students, intellectuals, and other parts of a disaffected urban population.

Taking advantage of the loosening political atmosphere, students throughout the nation's cities, led marches and protests, reacting to a variety of causes for their discontent, which was most attributed to the slow pace of reform. Li, along with the revolutionary elders who still wielded considerable power and influence, increasingly came to the opposite conclusion, staunchly opposing any rapid pace of economic or political change, which further exacerbated the mood of confusion and frustration rife among the nation's new era of university students.

Ideologically closer to the revolutionary elders, especially his mentor Chen Yun, Li had less expertise in modern economics than some of his contemporaries, Li favoring more the Soviet-style central economic planning and slower economic growth. Li most strongly believed that economic growth and a successful transition to the future was primarily dependent upon political stability.

Chairmanship of the National People's Congress

He remained premier until 1998, when he was constitutionally limited to two terms. After his second term expired, he became the chairman of the National People's Congress. Support for Li for the largely ceremonial position was low, as he only received less than 90% of the vote at the 1998 National People's Congress, where he was the only candidate. He spent much of his time monitoring what he considers his life's work, the Three Gorges Dam. Like many in his generation, the hydraulic engineer, who spent much of his career presiding over a vast and growing power industry, considered himself a builder and a modernizer.

Legacy

Although retired and in his early eighties, Li retains some influence in the PSC. The former Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China member Luo Gan, is considered to be his protégé. Since the 17th Party Congress, Li's influence has considerably waned and he is no longer active on China's political scene, partially owing to the corruption issues that plague him and his whole family.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen protests, Li took a role in the austerity program, the tight money policy, price controls on many commodities, supporting higher interest rates and the cut-off of state loans to the private and cooperative sectors, in attempts to reduce inflation. Deng and, particularly, Zhu Rongji later loosened these controls when they were no longer deemed necessary, as Zhu believed more in Zhao's open approach to markets, which continued to lead to the longer-term, steady, rapid, uninterrupted economic growth in the years that followed.

Li started two megaprojects when he was the premier, the Three Gorges Dam and Shenzhou Manned Space Program. Both programs were subject to much controversy within China and abroad, the latter especially due to its extraordinary cost of tens of billions in a country that sometimes referred to itself as Third World. Many economists and humanitarians suggested that those billions in capital might be better invested in helping the population deal with economic hardships and improvement in the areas of education, health services, and developing a dependable legal system. In 2010, The Critical Moment – Li Peng Diaries the diary supposedly written by him covering the period of the Tiananmen Square protests was released in Los Angeles.