Li Qiang

Based on Wikipedia: Li Qiang

In the labyrinthine world of Chinese politics, where careers are built over decades of careful maneuvering through provincial posts and party committees, Li Qiang's rise to become premier stands out for one remarkable reason: he skipped the queue. When he took office in March 2023, he became the first person since Zhou Enlai—the legendary revolutionary who served alongside Mao Zedong—to leap directly from local government to running China's State Council without ever holding a position in the central government.

That's not supposed to happen.

The Making of a Provincial Powerhouse

Li Qiang was born in July 1959 in Rui'an, a city in Zhejiang province on China's southeastern coast. His origins were humble. His father worked as a government clerk, having come from a poor family in a small village. His mother sold pork to make ends meet. Young Li was raised largely by his maternal grandmother, finishing school in the township of Mayu before taking his first job at seventeen—working at an irrigation pump station.

It was the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, and opportunities for ambitious young people were just beginning to reopen. Li studied agricultural mechanization at university, then later pursued graduate work in management and world economics. He even earned an executive Master of Business Administration from Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2005—a credential that would later inform his distinctive pro-business approach to governance.

Li joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1983 and began the long climb through China's bureaucratic ranks. He started as a clerk in the Communist Youth League—the traditional training ground for party officials—then spent years in the provincial civil affairs department, overseeing rural relief programs and personnel matters. By 1996, he had become party secretary of Yongkang, a county-level city known for its hardware manufacturing.

Then came Wenzhou.

The Wenzhou Model

In 2002, at just forty-three years old, Li became party secretary of Wenzhou, the youngest person to ever hold that position. Wenzhou matters in Chinese economic history because it represents something almost heretical within a nominally communist system: freewheeling private enterprise.

While much of China was still dominated by state-owned enterprises in the 1980s and 1990s, Wenzhou entrepreneurs were building private businesses with remarkable energy. They manufactured everything from lighters to shoes, often in family workshops that grew into substantial factories. The "Wenzhou model" became shorthand for bottom-up, private-sector-driven development—the opposite of the state-led industrialization that characterized much of Chinese economic policy.

Li embraced this spirit. He supported private business development and pushed to transform Wenzhou into what he called an "international light industry city." His tenure there established a pattern that would define his career: a willingness to champion entrepreneurs and market-oriented reforms, even when that put him somewhat at odds with more statist factions within the party.

The Xi Jinping Connection

In 2004, Li's career took a pivotal turn. He became secretary-general of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee, serving under a relatively obscure party secretary named Xi Jinping.

Xi would, of course, go on to become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. But in the mid-2000s, he was just another ambitious provincial official. Li became his right-hand man, handling administration and coordination for the province. The two grew close, and Li helped draft and refine what became known as Xi's "Double Eight Strategy"—a framework that identified eight comparative advantages of Zhejiang province and eight corresponding actions to capitalize on them.

This relationship would prove decisive. In Chinese politics, personal networks matter enormously. Officials who served alongside Xi during his years in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai form what analysts call the "New Zhijiang Army"—a faction of loyalists who have risen to prominence as Xi consolidated power. Li is among the most prominent members of this group.

There's a revealing anecdote from Li's time in Zhejiang. According to the Guangming Daily, Li told a professor at Zhejiang University that the provincial government needed an "independent think-tank like the RAND Corporation" to evaluate its performance. Why? Because, Li explained, it was "very difficult" for official organizations and officials to give objective analysis and criticize their superiors.

This led to the creation of a non-governmental group of experts in 2009, with Li as honorary director. When he later became governor of Zhejiang, he asked this group to write reports on his performance that would "tell the truth." When their first reports weren't critical enough, he paid them a personal visit to push for more candid feedback.

This willingness to seek honest criticism—rare among Chinese officials, who often operate in environments where subordinates tell superiors only what they want to hear—suggests something about Li's approach to governance. Whether it has survived his elevation to the highest levels of power, where the pressure to conform is even more intense, remains an open question.

The Characteristic Towns Experiment

As governor of Zhejiang from 2012 to 2016, Li pursued an intriguing experiment in urban planning: the creation of "characteristic towns." The idea was to develop small towns, each focused on a single type of business, with pro-business policies and pleasant physical environments.

The names sound almost whimsical. "Dream Town" for technology entrepreneurs. "Chocolate Town" for chocolate producers. The concept was that by concentrating expertise, supply chains, and regulatory support in one location, these specialized towns could become engines of innovation and growth.

Xi Jinping endorsed the concept and spread it to the rest of China. But the results were mixed. The Economist reported in 2023 that many such towns became speculative hotspots for housing developers, and the businesses they were supposed to cultivate sometimes failed to take off. It's a cautionary tale about the gap between innovative policy ideas and their messy implementation—a gap Li would encounter again in Shanghai.

The Internet That Wasn't

In 2014, Zhejiang was preparing to host an international internet conference. Li proposed something audacious: turning the host city into a pilot zone for unblocking China's strict internet controls for Western firms.

Think about what this would have meant. China's "Great Firewall" blocks access to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and countless other Western internet services. Li was essentially proposing a special economic zone for the internet—a place where foreign tech companies could operate freely.

The central leadership rejected the idea.

This episode reveals both Li's reformist instincts and their limits. He was willing to push for policies that challenged Beijing's orthodoxy, but he operated within a system where the center has final say. When Xi Jinping decided that internet control was too important to compromise, that was the end of the discussion.

Shanghai and the Crucible of COVID

In 2017, Li became party secretary of Shanghai—the first official to have governed all three of China's most economically dynamic provinces: Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Shanghai. His appointment to the Politburo, the Communist Party's top decision-making body, signaled that he was being groomed for higher things.

In Shanghai, Li continued his pro-business approach. He oversaw the opening of the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market, China's answer to the NASDAQ, designed to help technology companies raise capital. He attracted foreign investment, including persuading Tesla to build a massive factory in the city—the company's first manufacturing facility outside the United States. He loosened residency permit requirements for internal migrants and launched new town developments to address land shortages.

Then came 2022, and COVID-19.

Shanghai's two-month lockdown in early 2022 became one of the most controversial episodes of China's zero-COVID policy. Twenty-five million people were confined to their homes. Food shortages emerged. Residents shouted from their apartment windows in protest. Videos circulated on social media of elderly people being forcibly taken to quarantine facilities.

Li bore much of the blame. But the reality was more complicated than a simple story of local mismanagement.

According to various reports, Li was actually more open to living with COVID than the strict lockdown approach suggested. He had worked closely with Zhang Wenhong, a leading Shanghai epidemiologist who advocated for a more flexible strategy. The two men shared a hometown—both came from Rui'an in Wenzhou—and reportedly had a good personal relationship.

But Li was under intense pressure from central leadership to implement a harsh lockdown. When Beijing demanded zero-COVID, local officials had little choice but to comply, regardless of their personal views.

There's a revealing detail about Li's position within the leadership: according to The Wall Street Journal, he was one of the few people at the top who wanted China to introduce Western mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. He reportedly tried to arrange for BioNTech—the German company that partnered with Pfizer to develop one of the most effective COVID vaccines—to provide its shots in China. This never happened; China continued to rely on less effective domestically produced vaccines.

The Surprising Ascent

Despite the Shanghai lockdown debacle, Li's career continued its upward trajectory. In October 2022, he was appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee as its second-ranking member, putting him in line to become premier.

Many observers were surprised. Li had no experience in the central government—no stint as a vice premier, no time running a national ministry. The conventional path to becoming premier involved years of serving in Beijing, learning the machinery of the State Council, building relationships with the bureaucracy that would execute your policies.

Li had none of this. What he had was Xi Jinping's trust.

Skeptics speculated that Li's lack of central government experience would make him heavily dependent on Xi—less of an independent power center and more of a loyal implementer of the paramount leader's wishes. In a system that has historically featured some tension between the party general secretary (who runs the party) and the premier (who runs the government), this could mean a weaker premiership.

But Li has shown signs of strengthening rather than weakening his position. He has held more plenary meetings of the State Council than his predecessors Wen Jiabao and Li Keqiang. While these meetings previously focused mostly on formalities, Li has used them to issue more authoritative instructions. He established special study sessions of the State Council, similar to the Politburo's collective study sessions, and revived the Premier's Work Meeting, which had been abolished in 2003.

Intriguingly, Reuters reported that in late 2022, Li actually pushed back against Xi on COVID policy, advocating for faster relaxation of the zero-COVID rules while Xi wanted to slow the pace of reopening. If accurate, this suggests Li is not simply a yes-man, but someone capable of pressing his views even when they diverge from the top leader's preferences.

The Economy in His Hands

Li took office as premier in March 2023, inheriting an economy battered by three years of zero-COVID restrictions and ongoing regulatory crackdowns on the technology sector. His immediate challenge was restoring business confidence.

He moved quickly. In July 2023, China ended its heightened regulatory scrutiny of tech companies. Li personally met with representatives of major technology firms to convey what was described as the "strongest signal" of government support for the industry. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group who had effectively disappeared from public view after criticizing Chinese regulators in 2020, returned to China—reportedly after being persuaded by Li himself.

At the China Development Forum in March 2023, Li met with a parade of Western executives making their first trips to China since the pandemic: Tim Cook of Apple, Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates. His message was consistent: China would "unswervingly stick to opening up."

But words are easier than deeds. China's economy has continued to struggle with a property sector crisis, weak consumer spending, and growing tensions with the United States and its allies. In August 2023, Li called for more efforts to reach China's annual growth target. In January 2024, after the Chinese stock market registered deep declines, he called for "forceful" methods to stabilize it. By February 2025, he was exhorting officials to "turn pressure into motivation."

Li has also taken on additional portfolios. In November 2023, he was appointed head of the Central Financial Commission, a newly established Communist Party body overseeing the financial sector. This consolidation of authority over economic policy under party bodies—rather than government ministries—reflects a broader trend under Xi Jinping: the party taking more direct control of governance functions.

The Technology Imperative

A recurring theme in Li's activities as premier has been technological self-reliance. He has toured semiconductor manufacturers, battery producers, electric vehicle companies, and research universities, consistently calling for increased investment in research and development.

This reflects Beijing's response to American restrictions on China's access to advanced semiconductor technology. The United States has imposed increasingly stringent export controls, limiting China's ability to acquire the most sophisticated chips and the equipment to manufacture them. Li's factory tours and exhortations are part of a national mobilization to develop domestic alternatives.

The irony is worth noting. Li, the pro-business reformer who wanted to unblock the internet for Western firms, now leads a government pursuing technological decoupling from the West. The external environment has changed, and policy has changed with it.

What Kind of Premier?

Li Qiang represents something unusual in Chinese politics: a leader whose instincts lean toward markets and opening, operating within a system that has moved in more statist and nationalist directions under Xi Jinping.

His career demonstrates both the possibilities and the limits of reform-minded governance in contemporary China. He has consistently championed private enterprise and foreign investment. He has sought honest feedback about his own performance. He has proposed bold experiments like internet freedom zones. Yet he has also implemented harsh lockdowns when Beijing demanded them, and he leads an economy increasingly oriented toward technological self-sufficiency rather than global integration.

Perhaps the most telling detail is what didn't happen. Li's proposal to create an internet pilot zone in Zhejiang would have been genuinely transformative—a crack in the Great Firewall that might have widened over time. Its rejection illustrates the constraints under which even the most reformist Chinese officials operate.

As premier, Li sits at the center of China's economic policymaking during a period of profound challenge. The country faces a property crisis, a debt overhang, a demographic decline, and deteriorating relations with much of the developed world. Whether Li's pro-business instincts can help navigate these challenges—or whether he will be primarily an executor of Xi Jinping's vision—remains the central question of his tenure.

What's clear is that his journey from a pump station in rural Zhejiang to the second-most powerful position in China is a remarkable one. In a system that prizes careful, decades-long cultivation of relationships and credentials, Li skipped steps that others considered essential. His success or failure will say something not just about him, but about how China's political system selects and promotes its leaders—and whether unconventional paths can produce unconventional results.