Li Qiang is elected prime minister, a position jibarized by the rise of Xi Jinping
He new chinese premier is called li qiang, has 63 years and he was born in Wenzhou, the cradle of the toughest negotiators if we look at popular belief. He takes the helm three months after China shifted its priority from virus protection to stimulate the economy. There is little doubt about his abilities, there is much more about his range of action from a jibarized position after the irruption of Xi Jinping on the political stage.
Li was elected this morning by the National People’s Congress with 2,936 yeses and barely a dozen no’s and abstentions. He had been taken for granted ever since he was promoted to second place in the party at the fall congress. That conclave helped Xi to expunge from the Central Committee of the Politburo to the two currents that had shared power in recent decades: the Shanghai clan, led by former president Jiang Zemin, and the Communist Youth League, sponsored by former president Hu Jintao. The first recently passed away and the second suffers severe health ailments.
The mission in charge is órdago. The chinese economy it barely grew 3% last year, weighed down by the lockdowns of the zero covid policy, limping domestic consumption, turbulence in sectors as relevant as real estate and the sticks in the wheels of the United States, increasingly hostile in its trade and technology war. Li reaches the position with an unorthodox resume: there have been no prime ministers without experience in the State Council nor has he served in the rural provinces, a requirement demanded of the highest officials to ensure they have the whole country in mind. He has, in return, the full presidential confidence.
Friendship with Xi Jinping
Li specialized in agricultural mechanization and worked at an irrigation company. His bland career Politics flourished when in Zhejiang, his home province, a promising young man from high lineage revolutionary. It was Xi Jinping and in 2002 they forged a close friendship. There is no doubt about Li’s fidelity: last year he enthusiastically applied the zero covid policy during the two months that Shanghai was locked up.
They say of Li that he is pragmatic and defends the private sector space. In both Zhejiang and Shanghai, two economic poles on the east coast, he struggled against the crippling bureaucracy China, reducing the procedures for registering companies and streamlining production mechanisms.
In the Chinese financial capital, he multiplied foreign investment and favored the opening of the Tesla Superfactory, the first outside the United States. He is a fan of digital transformation and has met on several occasions with the most brilliant businessmen in the sector: Pony Ma, from Tencent, Robin Li, from Baidu, Jack Ma, from Alibaba… His biography, then, reveals potential friction with Xi Jinping: pragmatism in the face of ideology, enthusiastic from the private sector about the state machinery and close to a technology industry that has been bridled in recent years by Beijing. Time will tell if he stuck to his roadmap or succumbed like his predecessor, Li Keqiang.
This has probably been the most irrelevant prime minister in Chinese history. Ten years ago, when he was chosen as Xi’s partner, he was expected to advance his reform program. The result is devastating. The president, alpha and omega of the political scene, was cornering him from day one until his recent farewell at the opening of the assembly as a beaten man. His discrepancies were manifest. Li was wary of official economic data and recalled that millions of Chinese lived on a few tens of dollars when Beijing proclaimed its victory against poverty.
Against Li, he plays a lowered position that was once held by such capable and beloved types as Zhou Enlai, Zhao Ziyang or Wen Jiabao. His loyalty to Xi Jinping plays in his favor, the safest value that is dispatched today in Chinese politics.