Former Chinese premier Li Keqiang dies at 68

BEIJING, Oct 27 (Ali Raza): Former Chinese premier Li Keqiang, a reform-minded bureaucrat once tipped as the country’s future leader only to be eclipsed by President Xi Jinping, died on Friday. He was 68.

He had a heart attack on Thursday and passed away in Shanghai just after midnight. Interim Prime Minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar said he was “deeply saddened and shocked” to learn about Li’s passing and called him a “great friend of Pakistan”.

“We fondly remember his visit to Pakistan in 2013. Our thoughts and sympathies are with late premier Li, his family and with the Chinese nation at this hour of grief,” he said on a post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani remembered Li as a “statesman”, adding that he contributed to “strengthening” ties between Pakistan and China.

“As the then-foreign secretary, I organised his visit to Pakistan in May 2013. My thoughts are with premier Li, his family and the Chinese people,” he said. During his 10-year tenure as premier under Xi, Li cultivated an image as a more modern Communist Party loyalist compared to his stiffer colleagues. A career bureaucrat who spoke fluent English, he voiced support for economic reforms during his time in office.

The son of a minor party official in eastern China’s poor Anhui province, Li was sent to the countryside to work as a manual labourer during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. He went on to gain a law degree from Peking University, where classmates say he embraced Western and liberal political theory, translating a book on the law by a British judge. But he became more orthodox after joining the ranks of officialdom in the mid-1980s, working as a bureaucrat while his former classmates protested in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Praised for helping to steer the country through the global financial crisis relatively unscathed, his time in office saw a dramatic shift in power in China from the more consensus-based rule associated with former leader Hu Jintao and his predecessors, to the more concentrated power of Xi.