China’s incoming premier schooled in ‘free thought’

Local News
Premier-in-waiting Li Keqiang stands out for his casual and disarming command of English where other top Chinese leaders look awkward in the presence of English-speaking dignitaries.

BEIJING — Where other top Chinese leaders can only stand around and look awkward in the presence of English-speaking dignitaries, premier-in-waiting Li Keqiang stands out for his casual and disarming command of the language.

Report by Reuters

Li’s English skills say more about the man who will run the world’s second-largest economy than just an ability to schmooze US CEOs and European prime ministers — they were learned as a part of a surprisingly liberal university education.

Over three decades ago, Vice-Premier Li entered prestigious Peking University, a member of the storied “class of ‘77” who passed the first higher education entrance exams held after Mao Zedong’s convulsive Cultural Revolution, which had effectively put university education on hold.

More than any other Chinese party leader until now, Li (57), was immersed in the intellectual and political ferment of the following decade of reform under Deng Xiaoping, which ended in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that were crushed by troops.

As a student at Peking University, Li befriended ardent pro-democracy advocates, some of whom later became outright challengers to party control. His friends included activists who went into exile after the June 1989 crackdown.

He was caught up in the fervour of political and economic reform, helping translate The Due Process of Law by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist, into Chinese.

Li arrived at university in early 1978 from Anhui province in eastern China, dirt-poor farming country where his father was an official and where he was sent to toil in the fields during the Cultural Revolution.

He chose law, a discipline silenced for years as a reactionary pursuit and in the late 1970s still steeped in Soviet-inspired doctrines.

In a brief memoir of his time at university, Li paid tribute to Gong Xiangrui, one of the few Chinese law professors schooled in the West to survive Mao’s purges, and recalled the heady atmosphere of the time.

“I was a student at Peking University for close to a decade, while a so-called ‘knowledge explosion’ was rapidly expanding,” Li wrote in an essay published in a 2008 book.

But while classmates headed off to policy research, independent activism and even outright dissent, Li struck a more cautious course, abandoning ideas of study abroad and climbing the Communist Party’s Youth League, then a reformist-tinged ladder to higher office.

In spite of his liberal past, Li’s elevation is unlikely to bring much change on the political front, where reforms would require more unified support for any serious change.

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