Li Peng (; 20 October 1928 – 22 July 2019) was a Chinese politician who served as the premier of China from 1987 to 1998, and as 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 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hierarchy behind then CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin. He retained his seat on the CCP Politburo Standing Committee until his retirement in 2002.
Li was the son of an early Communist revolutionary, Li Shuoxun, who was executed by the Kuomintang. After meeting Zhou Enlai in Sichuan, Li was raised by Zhou and his wife, Deng Yingchao. Li trained to be an engineer in the Soviet Union and worked at an important national power company after returning to China. He escaped the political turmoil of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s due to his political connections and his employment in the company. After Deng Xiaoping became China's leader in the late 1970s, Li took a number of increasingly important and powerful political positions, first becoming Vice Minister and later Minister of Power. In 1983, he became a vice premier. In 1985, he became the minister of the State Education Commission as well as a member of the Politburo and the Party Secretariat. He was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee in 1987.
In 1987, following the appointment of Premier Zhao Ziyang as the CCP General Secretary, Li became the acting premier, before being appointed on a permanent basis in 1988. As Premier, Li became the most visible representative of the CCP who backed the use of force to quell the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. During the demonstrations, Li used his authority as premier to declare martial law and, in cooperation with Deng Xiaoping, who was the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, declared military law and the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen square protestors, ultimately resulting in a massacre. Li advocated a largely conservative approach to reform and opening up, which placed him at odds with General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who fell out of favour in 1989. After Zhao was removed from office, Li promoted a conservative socialist economic agenda but lost influence to incoming vice premier Zhu Rongji, and was unable to prevent the increasing market liberalization of the Chinese economy.
In 1998, Li was succeeded by Zhu Rongji as premier and became the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. During his time in office, he helmed the controversial Three Gorges Dam project. He and his family managed a large Chinese power monopoly, the State Power Corporation of China, which the Chinese government broke up after his term as premier expired. Li died at the age of 90 in Beijing.
Childhood Li was born as Li Yuanpeng () at his family house in Shanghai French Concession, now in 545 Yanan Road, Huangpu District in Shanghai. His family has ancestral roots in Chengdu, Sichuan. He was the son of Li Shuoxun, one of the earliest CCP revolutionaries, who was the political commissar of the Twentieth Division during the Nanchang uprising, and Zhao Juntao, also an early Communist operative. In 1931, Li's father, then working undercover in Hainan, was captured and executed by the Kuomintang. Li was believed to have met Deng Yingchao, wife of senior Communist leader Zhou Enlai, in Chengdu in 1939, who then took him to Chongqing to meet Zhou, though Zhou was in the Communist base of Yan'an, and they did not meet until late 1940. In 1941, when Li was twelve, Zhou sent Li to Yan'an, where Li studied until 1945. As a seventeen-year-old, in 1945, Li joined the Chinese Communist Party.
Early career In 1941, Li Peng began studying at the Yan'an Institute of Natural Science (a predecessor of the Beijing Institute of Technology). In July 1946, Li was sent to work in Zhangjiakou. According to his own recollection, in 1947, he journeyed through Shandong and North Korea, eventually ending up in Harbin where he began managing some work for a lard processing plant. In 1948, Li Peng was sent to study at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, majoring in hydroelectric engineering. A year later, in 1949, Zhou Enlai became Premier of the newly declared People's Republic of China. Li graduated in 1954. During his time in the Soviet Union, Li was the head of the Chinese Students Association in the Soviet Union.
When Li returned to China in 1955, the country was firmly under the control of the Communist Party. Li took part in technical, then management work in the power industry, beginning his career in Northeast China. At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, Li was sent to Beijing to head up the municipal power bureau. He played a leading role in the construction of the Tuhe Powerplant in Tangshan and the Gaojing Powerplant in Beijing. During his time at Gaojing, he worked three days and three nights supervising the construction of the site. On 4 October 1974, he was struck by a vehicle while riding his bicycle home from work. In 1976, Li was dispatched to affected regions of the Tangshan earthquake as head of the power restoration efforts.
Li advanced politically after the ascent of Deng Xiaoping, and served as the Vice Minister and later Minister of Power, the Communist Party secretary of the North China Electric Power Administration Bureau between 1979 and 1983, as well as the vice minister of Water Conservancy and Power between 1982 and 1983. Much of Li's rapid political promotion was due to the support of Party elder Chen Yun.
Li joined the Central Committee at the 12th Party National Congress in 1982. In 1983, he became the vice premier. In 1984, he was put in charge of the newly established State Council Leading Small Group on the Electronics Industry. In 1985 he was named minister of the State Education Commission, and was elected to the Politburo and the Party Secretariat. In 1986, he advocated that "China should rely mainly on its own products to push ahead with the modernization drive instead of importing large amounts of foreign equipment." In 1987, after the 13th Party National Congress, Li became a member of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee.
Premiership (1988–1998)
On 24 November 1987, after Premier Zhao Ziyang was promoted to CCP General Secretary, Li became acting Premier. On 1 December, at a State Council meeting, Li delivered a speech praising Zhao Ziyang's political reforms and dismissing "turbulent emotions in some departments" as "completely unnecessary". He was formally elected Premier in March 1988. At the time of his promotion, Li seemed like an unusual choice for Premier because he did not seem to share Deng's enthusiasm for introducing market reforms. Li was raised to the position of Premier thanks partially to the departure of Hu Yaobang, who was forced to resign as General Secretary after the Party blamed him for a series of student-led protests in 1987.
Throughout the 1980s, political dissent and social problems, including inflation, urban migration, and school overcrowding, became great problems in China. Despite these acute challenges, Li shifted his focus away from the day-to-day concerns of energy, communications, and raw materials allocation, and took a more active role in the ongoing intra-party debate on the pace of market reforms. Politically, Li opposed the modern economic reforms pioneered by Zhao Ziyang throughout Zhao's years of public service. He also became increasingly critical of economic reforms due to the high inflation rates. In 1988, he downgraded the role of the System Reform Commission, a State Council body created by Zhao Ziyang. While students and intellectuals urged greater reforms, some party elders increasingly feared that the instability opened up by any significant reforms would threaten to undermine the authority of the Communist Party, which Li had spent his career attempting to strengthen.
After Zhao became General Secretary, his proposals in May 1988 to expand free enterprise led to popular complaints (which some suggest were politically inspired) about inflation fears. Public fears about the negative effects of market reforms gave conservatives (including Li Peng) the opening to call for greater centralization of economic controls and stricter prohibitions against Western influences, 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.
1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre began with the mass mourning over the death of former General secretary Hu Yaobang, widely perceived to have been purged for his support of political liberalization. On the eve of Hu's funeral, 100,000 people gathered at Tiananmen Square. Beijing students began the demonstrations to encourage continued economic reform and liberalization, and these demonstrations soon evolved into a mass movement for political reform. From Tiananmen Square, the protesters later expanded into the surrounding streets. Non-violent protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai and Wuhan. Rioting occurred in Xi'an and Changsha.
The Tiananmen protests were partially protests against the affluence of the children of high-ranking Communist Party officials, and the perception that second-generation officials had received their fortunes through exploiting their parents' influence. Li, whose family had often been at the center of corruption allegations within the Chinese power industry, was vulnerable to these charges.
An editorial published in the People's Daily on 26 April and bearing the name of Deng Xiaoping, denounced the demonstrations as "premeditated and organized turmoil with anti-Party and anti-socialist motives". The article had the effect of worsening the demonstrations by angering its leaders, who then made their demands more extreme. Zhao Ziyang later wrote in his autobiography that although Deng had stated many of those sentiments in a private conversation with Li Peng shortly before the editorial was written, Li had the comments disseminated to Party members and published as the editorial without Deng's knowledge or consent.
Li strictly refused to negotiate with the Tiananmen protesters out of principle, and became one of the officials most objected to by protesters. One of the protest's key leaders, Wu'erkaixi, during a hunger strike, publicly scolded Li on National Television, saying he was ignoring the needs of the people. Some observers say that Wang Dan's statements insulted Li personally, hardening his resolve to end the protest by violent means. Among the other senior members of the central government, Li became the one who most strongly favored violence and known as the "Butcher of Beijing" for his role in the crackdown. After winning the support of most of his colleagues, apparently including Deng Xiaoping, Li officially declared martial law in Beijing on 20 May 1989 and promised "resolute and decisive measures to put an end to the turmoil". The protests were crushed by the military on 3–4 June. Most estimates of the dead range from several hundred to several thousand people. Li later described the crackdown as a historic victory for communism, and wrote that he feared the protests would be as potentially damaging to China as the Cultural Revolution had been. The martial law was lifted by Li on 10 January 1990.
Post-Tiananmen