Li Peng

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is 李 (Li).

4th Premier of the People's Republic of China
李鹏 Li Peng
Li Peng (right, with Klaus Schwab), 1992
In office April, 1988 – March, 1998
Deputy	Zhu Rongji Zou Jiahua Qian Qichen Li Lanqing
Preceded by	Zhao Ziyang
Succeeded by	Zhu Rongji
7th Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress
In office March, 1998 – March, 2003
Preceded by	Qiao Shi
Succeeded by	Wu Bangguo

Born	October 20, 1928 (1928-10-20) (age 79) Chengdu, Sichuan
Nationality	Chinese
Political party	Communist Party of China
Spouse	Zhu Lin
Alma mater	Moscow Power Engineering Institute
Profession	civil engineer

Li Peng (simplified Chinese: 李鹏; traditional Chinese: 李鵬; pinyin: Lǐ Péng; Wade-Giles: Li P'eng), (b. October 20, 1928) was the Premier of China between 1987 and 1998, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1998 to 2003 and was second-ranking in the Communist Party of China (CPC) behind Jiang Zemin on the Politburo Standing Committee until 2002.

Concerned about maintaining social and political stability, Li backed the use of force to quash the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and due to his relatively uncharismatic personality^{[citation needed]}, Li became one of the least popular Chinese leaders following the protests. Li promoted a cautious approach towards Chinese economic reform. As Premier, he oversaw a rapidly growing economy, with the GDP rising by almost 10% a year.

1 Personal background
2 Rise to power
3 Premiership
4 Chairmanship of the National People's Congress
5 Legacy
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Personal background

Li was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, the son of writer Li Shuoxun, one of the earliest CPC revolutionaries and a revolutionary martyr. Li was orphaned at age three when his father was executed by the Kuomintang. He became the adopted son of Zhou Enlai, perhaps the most revered founder of the PRC only behind Mao Zedong. As a teenager in 1945, Li joined the Chinese Communist Party.

[edit] 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.

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 a significant problem in China. Li shifted his focus from the day-to-day concerns of the energy, communications and raw materials departments to the forefront of the inter-party debate on the pace of market reforms. While student and intellectuals urged greater reforms, some party elders increasingly feared that the instability opened up by the reforms threatened to undermine their very purpose: economic development, the central focus of Li's career.

[edit] Premiership

Hu Yaobang, a protégé of Deng Xiaoping and a leading advocate of reform, was blamed for a series of 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 the party General Secretary, his proposal in May 1988 to accelerate price reform led to widespread popular complaints about rampant inflation and gave opponents of rapid reform the opening to call for greater centralization of economic controls and stricter prohibitions against Western influence. This precipitated a political debate, which grew more heated through the winter of 1988-1989.

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

Student demonstrators, taking advantage of the loosening political atmosphere, reacted to a variety of causes of discontent, which they attributed to the slow pace of reform. Li, along with the revolutionary elders who still wielded considerable influence, increasingly came to the opposite conclusion, regretting an excessively rapid pace of change for causing the mood of confusion and frustration rife among college students.

Closer to the revolutionary elders, especially his mentor Chen Yun, Li was more politically orthodox than some of his contemporaries, favoring greater central economic planning and slower economic growth. Although a committed reformer like Deng, Li noted that economic growth and a successful transition to the market rested on social and political stability.

University students and other citizens in Beijing camped out at Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu's death and to protest against those who would slow reform. Their protests, which grew despite government efforts to contain them, called for an end to official corruption and for defense of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Protests also spread through many other cities, including Shanghai and Guangzhou. These protest were occurring at a time when Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe were collapsing. Conservative PRC leaders were horrified that the Tiananmen protests could topple the government, at a time when, as they argued, political stability was so crucial for economic reforms and modernization. Li was foremost in the stance that the protest was to be put down, by force if necessary, and was instrumental in winning Chairman Deng Xiaoping over to his side. Li declared martial law in Beijing on May 20, 1989. In June, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had opposed Li, was dismissed and confined. The armed forces were sent into Beijing, causing the loss of hundreds of civilian lives.

After the Tiananmen crisis, Li was re-elected into the top policy-decision making body, the Politburo Standing Committee at the First Plenary Session of the 15th CPC Central Committee. It was the third time in succession for Li to be elected into the innermost circle of CPC's third generation of collective leadership since 1987. Li with the support of conservatives like Chen Yun initially attempted to roll back some of the market reforms and increase the role of administrative planning. However, in this effort Li was opposed by the provincial governors and by Deng Xiaoping, and Deng's famous Southern Tour in 1992 was considered by many to be a rebuke to economic conservatives. A proposal drafted by Li after Tiananmen to reduce the role of markets faced a large amount of opposition from within the government and was dropped.

By 1993, with the reforms speeding up and many elderly conservatives dead or ailing, Li was increasingly isolated. Stresses of the job combined with the political pressures from those favoring accelerating the reforms may have contributed to a heart attack that Li reportedly suffered in late April 1993, after which time many of his responsibilities for economic policy were transferred to his rival and successor as Premier, Zhu Rongji.

During his political career, Li made a number of visits to other countries, contributing to the development of friendship and cooperation between the PRC and other countries.

[edit] Chairmanship of the National People's Congress

He remained premier until 1998, when he was constitutionally limited to two terms. Then he was made 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. 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.

[edit] Legacy

Although retired and in his mid-seventies, 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.

However, Li is one of the most unpopular politicians in China, mainly for his lack of charisma, image as a hardliner, corruption among his family members, and role in suppressing the Tiananmen square protests. Some opponents of the Chinese government, especially international human rights groups, dubbed Li "the Butcher of Beijing" for being instrumental in the crackdown, although the amount of influence Li really had in ordering martial law is not exactly known. More critics also partly blamed Li for causing the economic troubles under Zhao's rule in the first place by objecting to proposed reforms so strongly that they were watered down and made inefficient.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen protests, Li helped tackle the related problems of inflation and social unrest, taking a role in the austerity program, the tight money policy, price controls on many commodities, higher interest rates and the cutoff of state loans to the private and cooperative sectors, which succeeded in reducing inflation. While Deng and Jiang later loosened these controls when they were no longer necessary, such policies are often viewed as vital for the steady, rapid, and uninterrupted economic growth in the years that followed.

Today the root causes of the student discontent of the 1980s, which contributed to an atmosphere of mass-protest and chaos, have largely subsided^{[citation needed]}. Inflation is low; overcrowding in dormitories is a far less pressing matter; the massive migrations from the countryside to the cities in the 1980s, perhaps the largest-scale human migration in history, are far more orderly^{[citation needed]}; the image of the Communist Party has improved and living standards have generally risen greatly^{[citation needed]}, especially in the booming Pacific coastal cities. The economic success of the years unfolding after the Tiananmen Square protests have perhaps solidified Li's legacy and defended his notion that social stability would be required to ensure a successful transition to a market economy^{[citation needed]}. Others say that his push to crush the student protests and oust Zhao from power have set back the argument for political and social reform in China for decades^{[citation needed]}.

Li started two megaprojects when he was the premier, the Three Gorges Dam and Shenzhou Manned Space Program.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Preceded by He Dongchang (Minister of Education)	Chairman of the State Education Commission 1985 – 1988	Succeeded by Li Tieying
Preceded by Zhao Ziyang	Premier of the People's Republic of China 1987–1998	Succeeded by Zhu Rongji
Preceded by Qiao Shi	Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress 1998 - 2003	Succeeded by Wu Bangguo