Li Peng, a former hard-line Chinese premier best known for announcing martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, dies at age 91.
BEIJING — Li Peng, a former hard-line Chinese premier best known for announcing martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, has died. He was 91.Li, a cautious, uninspiring figure, was a keen political infighter who spent two decades at the pinnacle of power before retiring in 2002. He leaves behind a legacy of extended and broad-based economic growth coupled with authoritarian political controls.
Li stepped down as premier in 1998, becoming chairman of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. He retired from the party’s seven-member ruling Standing Committee in 2002 as part of a long-planned handover of power to a younger generation of leaders headed by Hu Jintao. Li was one of the few leaders to inspire real dislike among the nation’s masses, although he was said to inspire loyalty among his subordinates.
After spending six years as an engineering student in Moscow, Li worked as an engineer for a decade in the country’s northeast. It was in that role that he established himself as a conservative, telling students in 1985 that China can never become capitalist: “To allow bourgeois freedoms would only make our country’s affairs chaotic.”
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