Back in 2014, essentially the most loyal of Xi Jinping’s loyalists heaped reward on Jack Ma, founding father of the Alibaba on-line commerce group and China’s most well-known entrepreneur. “There should be more Alibabas and more Jack Mas,” Li Qiang mentioned, talking at an web trade convention in his capability because the then governor of Alibaba’s residence province, Zhejiang.
Eight years later, Ma has been silenced by President Xi and Li Qiang has emerged from the Chinese Communist celebration’s historic 20th congress as its second-highest rating official. The congress additionally marked the beginning of Xi’s third five-year time period as celebration head and navy commander-in-chief. His reappointment as state president — and Li Qiang’s appointment to the premiership — can be rubber-stamped in March.
Xi has made it clear that politics and safety will eclipse economics as he prepares the celebration to metal itself for “high winds and perilous, stormy seas”. Lest there have been any doubts about his meant course of journey, on Thursday he led Li Qiang and the opposite 5 members of the celebration’s strongest physique on a tour of Yan’an. This arid outpost in northwestern China served as Mao Zedong’s revolutionary base earlier than he seized energy in 1949. It was there on the seventh congress that Mao, like Xi on the twentieth, solidified his place because the celebration’s unassailable paramount chief.
The greatest query about Li Qiang, 63, is whether or not he’ll now merely help and abet Xi’s instincts and directions, which have crushed the animal spirits of the world’s second-largest financial system. Or whether or not he’ll use the belief Xi has in him — and his expertise as a pro-business, seemingly reform-minded regional chief — to mitigate the results of the president’s most controversial insurance policies.
In 2015 Li Qiang informed state media that bolder financial reforms had been a matter of “life and death”. “The government cannot be an unlimited government,” he mentioned. “To build a limited yet effective modern government, you need to transfer a lot of managerial power to social organisations.” It is a sentiment that would appear to run counter to Xi’s newer insistence that “the party is leader of all” and his administration’s relentless repression of civil society.
“Being a loyal ally to Xi should not be considered a sin,” argues Chen Long at Plenum, a Beijing-based consultancy. Chen provides that “there is potentially a large upside” for Li, as his insurance policies can be assumed to have Xi’s blessing. That was not the case with outgoing premier Li Keqiang, who Xi distrusted as a one-time rival and shortly sidelined.
Li Qiang was born in a rural space of Zhejiang and appeared certain for a stable however not spectacular political profession. After finding out agricultural engineering, he labored his manner by a sequence of posts in Zhejiang’s civil affairs division. In 2002, he was appointed celebration boss of Wenzhou, a metropolis well-known for its entrepreneurs. He comes throughout as amiable and assured, in keeping with those that have handled him. He and his spouse, a retired civil servant, have a daughter.
Ling Li, a China skilled on the University of Vienna, notes that like most of the officers appointed final week, Li Qiang labored beneath Xi whereas the long run president was an up-and-coming provincial official. As such, he was “lifted from political obscurity to positions of power after 2012”, the yr that Xi was first appointed celebration basic secretary.
Li Qiang served Xi in a secretarial function when he was governor of Zhejiang within the mid-2000s. Shortly after Xi assumed energy, he took off like “a helicopter”, as fast-rising politicians are generally referred to in China. He was appointed governor of Zhejiang himself in 2013 and have become the highest official in close by Jiangsu province three years later. In 2017, he was promoted once more to change into celebration secretary of Shanghai, a posting that originally strengthened his fame as competent and enterprise pleasant.
It was on his watch that the Shanghai inventory trade launched a brand new buying and selling board for know-how firms and Elon Musk constructed Tesla’s largest abroad manufacturing facility within the metropolis. Li Qiang was additionally credited for the monetary centre’s initially deft dealing with of Covid-19. By eschewing the across-the-board lockdowns adopted elsewhere in favour of extra focused administration of small outbreaks, he diminished the economic impact.
But the fame he had constructed up over years was shredded in weeks this spring, because the virus lastly overwhelmed Shanghai. Li Qiang was pressured to implement some of the intensive — and badly managed — lockdowns China has seen because the very begin of the pandemic. Many residents in one of many nation’s most affluent cities struggled to safe sufficient meals for his or her locked-in households. As one know-how government informed the FT on the time, “what’s the point of being rich if you can’t get fresh vegetables?”
At the outset of this ordeal, Li Qiang was harangued by three aged residents for his administration’s incompetence whereas out an inspection tour. “You are guilty in the eyes of the nation,” considered one of them mentioned, in keeping with movies and Hong Kong media reviews. “You shame the martyrs [of the revolution]. You shame heaven and earth.”
Li Qiang’s boss, nevertheless, noticed it very in a different way. For Xi, says Ling Li, the lockdown as a substitute “showed Li’s exemplary character as a true communist who can make difficult decisions and take on heavy responsibilities at critical moments for the party”.
Additional reporting by Xueqiao Wang and Cheng Leng
tom.mitchell@ft.com
