Chris Buckley
BEIJING, Oct 22 - The Communist elite of China, the land of Mao Zedong, now has a likely top leader who as a student mixed with democracy advocates and learned the ideas of wigged English judges at a university that fostered dissent.
Li Keqiang, a 52-year-old who has been Party secretary of the northeastern province of Liaoning, was named today as a member of the Communist Party’s Standing Committee, the country’s innermost circle of power.
His elevation will put him in contention to succeed Hu or government chief Premier Wen Jiabao five years hence.
Li’s rise through the Communist Youth League, which also nurtured President Hu Jintao, and quick-march postings in big, tough provinces have marked him for higher things.
But Li’s past as an intellectually voracious law student in an era of liberal ferment would mark a break with the staid engineers who have run China since the 1990s.
He was at the elite Peking University from the late 1970s, when cries for free speech and democracy sprouted in the disillusion left by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
He plunged into campus politics as reformist ideas galvanised students, befriended free thinkers who went on to notoriety as dissidents, struggled to master English, and co-translated ``The Due Process of Law’’ by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist.
Li’s past does not make him a harbinger of radical liberalisation. Associates described him as a political chameleon who stayed carefully inside the system and paid his dues as a loyal functionary while classmates went abroad or into business.
But his background seems sure to fuel questions about whether the Communist Party can ensure future leaders stick to cautious political orthodoxy as they negotiate dramatic economic change.
``Being a university student is an age when a person’s value framework is set,’’ said Zhang Zuhua, a former Youth League official who closely observes politics.
``That period certainly had a huge impact on his outlook. The question is whether he is able to use it or has to struggle against it.’’
Even before university, Li amassed rich political experience. Born in Anhui province in July 1955, his father was a local rural official, according to Zhang, the analyst.
Li worked on a rural commune in Fengyang County – notoriously poor even for Mao’s time and one of the first places to quietly revive private bonuses in farming in the late 1970s.
By the time he left the land, Li was a Communist Party member and secretary of his production brigade.
He was among the first university students to win their places in intensely competitive exams revived in 1977, as Deng Xiaoping and other reformers began to shed Mao’s radicalism.
Li arrived at a campus that was historically the country’s most respected and most liberal.
Peking University was among the first Chinese schools to restore law teaching after the Cultural Revolution, and Li attached himself to a British-educated professor, Gong Xiangrui, who taught then exotic liberal ideas.
Outside class, Li mixed with radical thinkers and joined an intellectual salon'' that included Wang Juntao, later condemned as a counter-revolutionary black hand’’ after the 1989 purge, Wang recounted in a memoir.
In 1980 Li, then in the official student union, endorsed controversial campus elections contested by Hu Ping and other pro-democracy activists, Hu recalled from New York. Party conservatives were aghast at the radical experiment.
But Li, already a prudent player, stayed out of the controversial vote.
``After the election, I talked to him about elections, democracy and the political future of China,’’ Hu said.
``At that time it seemed that we shared many ideas about what sort of democracy China should become.’’
As others peeled off into radical dissent, Li continued climbing the Party hierarchy. In 1983 he joined the Youth League’s central secretariat, headed then by Hu Jintao.
After the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989, Li was marooned in the League, tainted by past liberal links, said Zhang, the analyst.
After biding his time, in 1998 he was sent to Henan province, a poor and restless belt of rural central China, rising to become Party secretary for two years.
In late 2004, he was made Party chief of Liaoning, a rustbelt province striving to attract investment and reinvent itself as a modern industrial heartland.
Despite Li’s past, the Party’s powerful norms of conformity and caution would discourage him from pressing for dramatic political change, wrote Wang, the exiled dissident.
It's not that I don't trust Li Keqiang,'' wrote Wang. It’s that I don’t trust China’s politics and system.’’