"The man for Xi Jinping": China's next premier is expected to be Li, a longtime ally.
China's next premier is expected to be Li Qiang, who pushed for an immediate end to the zero-Covid policy late last year.
Ankush Pandey
Reuters says: The man who was set to become China's next premier quietly worked behind the scenes for four years to drive a bold overhaul of the sclerotic stock market in the megacity, four years before Li Qiang gained notoriety as the force behind the COVID lockdown of Shanghai that lasted for two months.
Li's back-channeling demonstrated his reputation for pragmatism and close ties to President Xi Jinping. According to sources, he went around the China Securities Regulatory Commission, which lost some of its power under the new structure.
At the end of 2018, Xi himself announced the pilot of a registration-based IPO system and Shanghai's new tech-focused STAR Market, two reforms designed to encourage China's most promising young businesses to list locally rather than overseas.
READ: China Premier Li Keqiang resigns as Xi loyalists take over "The CSRC was very unhappy," said a seasoned banker who was close to regulators and Shanghai officials but who declined to be named due to the sensitive nature of the situation.
The individual went on to say that "Li's relationship with Xi played a role here," allowing him to present the plan directly to the central government without going through the CSRC.
A request for clarification from the CSRC was not received.
Li, who previously held the position of chief of the Communist Party in Shanghai, is expected to be appointed premier on Saturday during the ongoing National People's Congress and will be in charge of running the world's second-largest economy. He would take over for Li Keqiang, who is retiring and is widely believed to have become increasingly absent as Xi tightened his grip on economic management.
According to observers of leadership, Li Qiang's closeness to Xi is both a strength and a weakness: He has Xi's confidence, but he is dependent on his long-time patron.
Also read: How China's next premier reversed Xi Jinping's zero-carbon curbs Trey McArver, co-founder of the consulting firm Trivium China, predicted that Li would be significantly more powerful than his predecessor.
Given Li's lack of central government experience and the Shanghai lockdown, McArver stated, Xi expended significant political capital to place him in the position.
He stated, "Officials are aware that Li Qiang is Xi Jinping's guy."
"He clearly thinks that Li Qiang is a very competent person, and he has put him in this position because he trusts him and expects a lot of him," reads the statement.
Questions sent to China's State Council Information Office were not answered by Li, 63.
Practical Pragmatist Li, a career bureaucrat, was announced as the candidate for China's No. 2 position in October when Xi unveiled a lineup of loyalist leaders.
At the time, Li was well-known for overseeing the agonizing COVID lockdown of Shanghai's 25 million people earlier this year, which shut down the city's economy and left its residents with psychological scars. That made him the target of ire, but it didn't stop him from getting promoted.
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Li was additionally instrumental in pushing for China's startlingly unexpected finish to its zero-Coronavirus strategy before the end of last year, Reuters wrote about Friday.
Li has been described as practical, an efficient bureaucrat, and a supporter of the private sector by those who have interacted with him. This would be expected from someone whose career has placed him in charge of some of China's most economically dynamic regions.
Zhou Dewen, who represented small and medium-sized businesses in the city, stated that Li appeared to be open-minded and willing to listen while serving as chief of the Communist Party from 2002 to 2004 in his hometown of Wenzhou, a hub of entrepreneurialism.
Zhou stated, "Rather than the traditional approach of keeping private companies out by default, he took a liberal approach of granting private companies default access to enter the market, except when explicitly prohibited by law."
Former U.S. official Craig Allen, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, stated that Li sought to level the playing field for foreign businesses, citing the speed with which Tesla opened its Shanghai factory in 2019
"Obviously nothing disrupted the general flow once a choice was made. Allen said, describing Li as being at ease in his own skin, "There was a clarity of a kind in his decision-making, an authority, and that really helps."
However, given that Xi has steadily tightened Communist Party control and moved the economy in a more statist direction, some observers warn against relying too heavily on Li's experience in a business hub like Shanghai.
According to Neil Thomas, a senior analyst at Eurasia, "Now Li is a national leader, working under a market-sceptic boss, and he has to balance growth with a range of social, technological, and geopolitical goals."
No Wall-FLOWER Even by Chinese politics' opaque standards, little is known about Li's upbringing or personal life.
Li, who was 17 when he started working at an irrigation station in his hometown in 1976, was born in the county of Ruian, which is now part of Wenzhou. This was a popular job in what turned out to be the last year of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
Li enrolled at Zhejiang Agricultural University in 1978, when the country's campuses reopened and admissions were highly competitive. He went on to earn master's degrees from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Beijing central party school.
When Xi was provincial party secretary and Li was his chief of staff from 2004 to 2007, the two men would have formed a personal bond in Zhejiang, home to some of China's largest private companies.
Li and Xi, according to American author Robert Lawrence Kuhn, had an easy rapport when they met in 2005 and 2006.
Kuhn told Reuters, "Li was not a wallflower, unlike most other staffers of top leaders."
According to Kuhn, "he felt comfortable and confident enough in the presence of Xi to put himself forward to engage me, which tells me he is not concerned his boss might think he is trying to steal his spotlight."
However, leadership observers asserted that Li's capabilities will be constrained.
Former Shanghai University of Political Science and Law associate professor and Chilean commentator Chen Daoyin stated, "Li can make some repairs here and there, but he won't tear down the wall and build something new."
