Tue, Mar 07, 2023 page4

• Li bows out as Xi loyalists take over

  • AP, BEIJING
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  After a decade in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) shadow, Li Keqiang (李克強) is taking his final bow as the country’s premier, marking a shift away from the skilled technocrats who have helped steer the world’s second-largest economy in favor of officials known mainly for their unquestioned loyalty to China’s most powerful leader in recent history.

  After exiting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee in October last year — despite being below retirement age — Li’s final major task was delivering the state of the nation address to the rubber-stamp parliament yesterday. The report sought to reassure citizens of the resiliency of the Chinese economy, but contained little that was new.

  Once seen as a potential top leader, Li was increasingly sidelined as Xi accumulated ever-greater powers and elevated the military and security services in aid of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Li’s lack of visibility sometimes made it difficult to remember he was technically ranked No. 2 in party.

  

  Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivers a report during the opening session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sunday.

  Photo: AFP

  Li “was a premier largely kept out of the limelight by order of the boss,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies and a longtime observer of Chinese politics.

  In an era in which personal loyalty trumps all, the fact that Li was not seen purely as a Xi loyalist might end up being “the main reason why he will be remembered fondly,” Tsang said.

  For most of his career, Li was known as a cautious, capable and highly intelligent bureaucrat who rose through, and was bound by, a consensus-oriented CCP that reflexively stifles dissent.

  As governor and then party secretary of the densely populated agricultural province of Henan in the 1990s, Li squelched reporting on an AIDS outbreak tied to illegal blood-buying rings, allegedly with the collusion of local officials.

  Although Li was not in office when the scandal broke, his administration worked to cover it up, prevented victims from seeking redress and harassed private citizens working on behalf of orphans and others affected.

  However, Li also cut a modestly different profile as an English speaker from a generation of politicians schooled during a time of greater openness to liberal Western ideas.

  Introduced to politics during the chaotic Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, he was accepted into the prestigious Peking University, where he studied law and economics, on his own merits rather than through political connections.

  After graduation, Li went to work at the Communist Youth League, an organization that grooms university students for party roles, then headed by future president and party leader Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). Higher office soon followed.

  Among the largely faceless ranks of Chinese bureaucrats, Li managed to show an unusually candid streak. In a US Department of State cable released by WikiLeaks, Li is quoted telling diplomats that Chinese economic growth statistics were ‘‘man-made,” and saying he looked instead to electricity demand, rail cargo traffic and lending as more accurate indicators.

  Although no populist, in his speeches and public appearances, Li was practically typhonic compared to the typically languorous Xi.

  Yet he largely failed to make effective use of the platforms he was given, unlike his immediate predecessors. At his sole annual news conference on the closing day of each congressional annual session, Li used up most of his time repeating talking points and reciting statistics. Throughout the upheavals of China’s three-year battle against COVID-19, Li was practically invisible.

  Hailing from a humble background, Li had been seen as Hu’s preferred successor as president, but the need to balance party factions prompted the leadership to choose Xi, the son of a former vice premier and party elder, as a consensus candidate.

  The two never formed anything like the partnership that characterized Hu’s relationship with his premier, Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) — or Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) with the redoubtable Zhou Enlai (周恩來) — although Li and Xi never openly disagreed over fundamentals.

  “Xi is not the first among equals, but rather is way above equal,” said Li Cheng (李成), an expert on Chinese leadership at the Brookings Institute in Washington.

  Ultimately, Li was a “team player” who put party unity foremost, he said.

  Meanwhile, Li Keqiang’s authority was gradually shrunk, beginning with a reorganization of offices in 2018.

  While some may have wished that the premier had been more “influential or decisive,” the ground was crumbling under his feet as Xi shifted more of the powers of the Chinese State Council to party institutions, Li Cheng said.

  That shift to expanded party control is expected to continue at the current congress meeting on an even greater scale.

  At the same time, Xi appeared to favor trusted longtime brothers-in-arms such as economic adviser Liu He (劉鶴) and head of the legislature Li Zhanshu (栗戰書) over Li Keqiang, leaving him with little visibility or influence.

  His departure leaves major questions about the future of the private sector that Xi has been reining in, along with wider economic reforms championed by Li Keqiang and his cohort.

  His expected replacement, Li Qiang (李強), is a Xi crony from his days in provincial governments and as party secretary of Shanghai, best known for his ruthless implementation of that city’s COVID-19 lockdown last year.

  “Li Keqiang has been associated with a more economics-focused take on governance, which contrasts strongly with the ideological tone that Xi has brought to politics,” Oxford University history professor Rana Mitter said. “Li may be the last premier of his type, at least for a while.”

  Li Keqiang might be remembered less for what he achieved than for being the last of the technocrats to serve at the top of the CCP, said Carl Minzner, an expert on Chinese law and governance at New York’s Fordham University and the Council on Foreign Relations.

  Politically, Xi’s authoritarian tendencies risk a return to Mao-era practices in which elite politics become “yet more byzantine, vicious and unstable,” Minzner said.

  Li Keqiang’s departure “marks the end of an era in which expertise and performance, rather than political loyalty to Xi himself, was the primary career criterion for ambitious officials seeking to rise up to higher office,” he said.
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