The Chinese public reacted with shock and grief at the sudden death of former premier Li Keqiang, while foreign diplomats, business leaders and China watchers around the world offered their condolences.
Li was pronounced dead shortly after midnight on Friday after suffering a heart attack. The news was broken by the state broadcaster CGTN. Further details about his death have not been made public.
The former premier, who was born in Anhui province, was visiting Shanghai. At 68, Li was healthy and energetic, and there had been no reports of him suffering any chronic illness.
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The news took China and the world by surprise. By 2pm Friday, there were 6.15 million posts about Li’s death, making it the top trending topic on the popular social media platform.
Tao Jingzhou, an international arbitrator and a classmate of Li’s at Peking University, said he was astonished to hear of Li’s sudden death.
“Keqiang has left us forever,” Tao wrote on X, a social media platform previously known as Twitter.
“He was a man who couldn’t be left idle in his life, who bowed down and tolerated each other for the sake of his country, and it was too sudden for him to leave us.”
In a message to the South China Morning Post, Tao said Li would be remembered for his role as the first premier in China’s history with a bachelor of laws and the first with a doctorate in economics.
“Without the reform and opening up and resumption of the college entrance examination system, he might have been farming in the countryside of Anhui province like me, and the door of Peking University would not have been opened for us,” Tao said.
Li Keqiang, former premier of China, dead after heart attack
Jiang Mingan, a Peking University law professor and another former classmate of Li’s, said he was saddened by the news, saying it was “beyond the power of any words” to describe it.
It was a reaction shared by many who took to social media to pay tribute to a man remembered as “the people’s premier” for his down-to-earth but warm personality and caring and capable leadership.
Many who had first-hand experience of the former premier shared photos of him on the social media platform Weibo, including of his visit to Yaan in Sichuan province immediately after the region was ravaged by a strong earthquake in 2013 and his visit to a hospital in Wuhan in late January 2020. He was the first top Chinese leader to visit the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic when it broke out.
“It warmed my heart when Li told medical workers in Wuhan to call home every day,” one Weibo user wrote.
In Tokyo, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, the top government spokesman, said Li had “played a significant role” in bilateral relations. In 2018, Li paid an official visit to Japan, when he also join a trilateral leaders’ meeting that also involved South Korea.
“We hereby offer our sincere condolences and prayers for former premier Li Keqiang,” Matsuno said.
The Japanese government will send a formal message of condolences, according to news agency Kyodo.
In Washington, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed his condolences on the passing of Li, according to Matthew Miller, State Department spokesman.
In Hong Kong, officials attending a press conference all changed to wearing black ties as a mark of respect for the late premier.
Tam Yiu-chung, who was Hong Kong’s sole member of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, said he was “stunned and saddened” by the news of Li’s death.
Since taking office in 2013, Li as premier received delegations led by Hong Kong chief executives every year to brief the country’s top leaders in Beijing on the city’s political and economic development over the previous year.
Tam recalled his encounter with Li in a lift in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and described him as a warm and easy-going person
“Li was very much engaged in Hong Kong affairs and has all along been very supportive of Hong Kong’s development,” Tam said.
In a statement, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said it was “deeply saddened” by the sudden death of Li, who it said “always paid close attention to the concerns of European companies operating in China”.
It described Li as “an important interlocutor for the foreign business community”.
“He was a pragmatic, forward-thinking man who placed great importance on the reform and opening of China’s economy,” the chamber said.
Bert Hofman, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, first met Li when he was party chief of Liaoning province, the biggest economy in China’s rust-belt industrial northeastern region.
“He always struck me as very committed to China’s development, intellectually curious, with a highly sophisticated understanding of the Chinese economy and how China could learn from international good practice in economic management,” said Hofman, who met Li several times as part of World Bank delegations when Li was vice-premier and then premier.
Premier Li’s second term: from ‘Likonomics’ to following orders
Tang Dajie, a senior researcher with Beijing-based research group the China Enterprise Institute, said one of the most impressive policies Li promoted was tax reform since 2016 in an effort to cut the burden on Chinese companies and release economic potential.
An unprecedented tax rebate programme was also rolled out to support small and medium-sized enterprises after the pandemic broke out in early 2020.
“To people’s daily life, most impressively after the pandemic, Li showed his strong support for the so-called street-stall economy, which is a very tiny part [of the country’s economy] but it was raised by the premier of the country,” Tang said.
“You can tell his working style from this,” he said. “On one hand, he had adequate understanding in economic reforms and macroeconomy, and on the other hand, he was very concerned about some of the most basic and fundamental issues relating to the people’s livelihood.”
Additional reporting by Wendy Wu, Jun Mai, Frank Tang and Siqi Ji
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