Back in 2010,
WikiLeaks (
then still working with the Guardian), published a 2007 U.S. diplomatic cable featuring an unknown diplomat's assessment of a rising star in the Chinese Communist Party, Li Keqiang.
Li made a good impression on the US Ambassador, the cable said, being "engaging and well-informed on a wide range of issues" and displaying a "good sense of humor and appeared relaxed and confident throughout".
Crucially, Li seemed well-aware of what would become one of the biggest problems in modern China: corruption. Here's an excerpt from he cable:
Although Liaoning residents are dissatisfied with education, health care and housing issues, it is corruption that makes them most angry, Li told the Ambassador. The most effective way to combat official graft is to create a transparent system of rules and adequate supervision that leaves corrupt officials no room to act. This is the method Liaoning employed to manage the vast sums spent on its massive slum relocation project. Once a corrupt official is discovered, he is promptly punished, which provides a good lesson to bureaucrats taking up new posts. The province has also increased efforts to "strictly educate" public officials, Li said. Part of this education involves prison tours that force bureaucrats to visit incarcerated officials convicted of graft in order to witness first hand the consequences of malfeasance.
It's worth bearing this passage in mind, now that we are entering China's Leadership Transition, with Li widely expected to become Prime Minister of China alongside President Xi Jinping.
Li's ascendancy
Li is expected to succeed Wen Jiabao as the premiere of China, and like Wen, Li is known for his humble origins.
Born in 1955 in the poor Anhui province, Li was the son of a local official. He went to the prestigious Peking University, became an excellent English speaker, and eventually gained a PhD in economics.
According to Reuters, Li immersed himself in the political ferment of the following decade of reform under Deng Xiaoping, even going so far as to befriend pro-democracy (even some that later were put in exile for their role in protests).
One key aspect of his career was the Communist Youth League, where he gained the patronage of the man who ran the league in the 1980s, current President Hu Jintao. Known as a practical administrator, Li went on to become party leader in Henan, in central China, and Liaoning province in the northeast. Both districts prospered under his leadership.
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