Li Qiang has been elected as China’s premier for the next five years, succeeding Li Keqiang, according to results announced during a national congress meeting Saturday morning. In the new role, he will lead the State Council, China’s cabinet, whose responsibilities include managing the country’s economic development.
The former Shanghai party secretary became the eighth premier since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. Li Qiang’s nomination by Xi Jinping, who was reelected as president of the country on Friday, was approved by nearly 3,000 delegates of the National People’s Congress.
Xi shook hands with both the incoming and outgoing premiers in the Great Hall of the People, before signing a presidential decree to officially appoint Li Qiang as the country’s No. 2 official.
Last October, Li Qiang was elected to be the second-ranked member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the party’s Central Committee, the top decision-making body of the Communist Party of China, following the 20th National Party Congress.
Li will hold a press conference with Chinese and foreign journalists as the new premier on Monday after the annual congressional gatherings conclude.
The 63-year-old had a decades-long career serving in three eastern provincial-level regions of the Yangtze River Delta, accounting for one-fifth of China’s GDP. More recently, he was Shanghai’s party chief from 2017 to 2022 before being elected to the party’s Central Committee.
A native of Rui’an in East China’s Zhejiang, Li Qiang spent nearly 40 years of his professional career in his home province, working his way up from an electric pumping station worker to the provincial governor in 2013.
During an interview with Caixin in the same year, the then 54-year-old governor cheered the value of private enterprises and Zhejiang’s entrepreneurial spirit. He also said province’s vitality laid in “the market, the grassroots community, and setting the private entities free” in a 2014 interview with the state-run People’s Daily.
During his tenure in Zhejiang, Li implemented measures to improve government efficiency such as streamlining administrative systems. The province also became a testing ground for the development of “characteristic towns,” a plan to cultivate specific industrial, cultural, tourism or community features of localities. Since 2014, more than 100 areas have been earmarked for the purpose, attracting some 10,000 entrepreneurs and hundreds of millions of dollars in financing.
Prior to becoming the province’s governor, Li was secretary-general of the Zhejiang provincial party committee, a role similar to the chief of staff, between 2004 and 2012. In 2002, he became party chief of the city of Wenzhou, one of Zhejiang’s key commercial centers, at the age of 43 — the youngest in the city’s 40-year history since its official establishment.
After Zhejiang, Li then served as party chief of neighboring province of Jiangsu, which boasts China’s second-largest provincial economy in terms of GDP, for less than two years. He was then appointed party secretary of Shanghai, replacing Han Zheng, who was elected as China’s vice president Friday.
Li first studied agricultural mechanization at Zhejiang Agricultural University after the national college entrance exam was restored in 1978. He later earned an executive MBA degree from Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2005.
Contact reporter Kelly Wang (jingzhewang@caixin.com) and editor Bertrand Teo (bertrandteo@caixin.com)
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