|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
March 8, 2014 |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Lĭ P?ng (李鵬) (b. October, 1928) was the Chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1998 to 2003 and was second-ranking in the Communist Party of China (CPC) behind Jiang Zemin on the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China until 2002. He served as Premier of the People's Republic of China|Premier of the State Council between 1987 and 1998. Concerned about maintaining social and political stability, Li promoted a cautious approach towards Chinese economic reform. As premier, he oversaw a rapidly growing economy, with the Gross Domestic Product | GDP rising by almost 10 percent a year. For his part in the violent suppression of the Tiananmen protests in 1989, he remains personally unpopular with large segments of the Chinese population. Li was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, the son of writer Li Shouxun, one of the earliest CPC revolutionaries and a revolutionary martyr. Li was orphaned at age three when his father was executed by the Kuomintang. He became the adopted son of Zhou Enlai, perhaps the most revered founder of the PRC only behind Mao Zedong. As a teenager in 1945, Li joined the Chinese Communist Party. Like other Communist Party cadres of the Generations of Chinese leadership|third generation, Li gained a technical background. In 1941 he began studying at the Institute of Natural Science in Yan'an. In 1948, he was sent to study at the Moscow Power Institute, majoring in hydroelectricity | hydroelectric engineering. During the period he was chairman of the Chinese Students Association in the Soviet Union. A year later, Zhou Enlai became Premier of the newly declared People's Republic of China, and Li survived the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Li advanced politically, becoming deputy minister of the state power industry in 1979 and then minister in 1981. Between 1979 and 1983, he served as vice-minister and minister of Power Industry and secretary of the Party Group of the Ministry of Power Industry, and vice-minister and deputy secretary of the Party group of the Ministry of Water Resources and Power. After Li was elected member of the CPC Central Committee at the Twelfth CPC National Congress in 1982, he rose to the Politburo of the Communist Party of China|Politburo and the Party Secretariat in 1985, and the standing committee of the Politburo in 1987, when he also became acting premier. Beginning in 1983, Li Peng served as vice-premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. Beginning in 1985, he served concurrently as minister in charge of the State Education Commission. In this position, as political dissent as well as social problems such as inflation, urban migration, and school overcrowding emerged, Li shifted his focus from the day-to-day concerns of the energy, communications and raw materials departments to the forefront of the inter-party debate on the pace of market reforms. While student and intellectuals urged greater reforms, some party elders increasingly feared that the instability opened up by the reforms threatened to undermine their very purpose: economic development, the central focus of Li's career. Hu Yaobang, a prot?g? of Deng Xiaoping and a leading advocate of reform, was blamed for a series of protests and forced to resign as CPC General Secretary in January 1987. Premier Zhao Ziyang was made General Secretary and Li Peng, former Vice Premier and Minister of Electric Power and Water Conservancy, was made Premier of the People's Republic of China. After Zhao became the party General Secretary, his proposal in May 1988 to accelerate price reform led to widespread popular complaints about rampant Inflation (economics)|inflation and gave opponents of rapid reform the opening to call for greater central planning | centralization of economic controls and stricter prohibitions against Western influence. This precipitated a political debate, which grew more heated through the winter of 1988-1989. The death of Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989, coupled with growing economic hardship caused by high inflation, provided the backdrop for the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989|largescale protest movement of 1989 by students, intellectuals, and other parts of a disaffected urban population. Student demonstrators, taking advantage of the loosening political atmosphere, reacted to a variety of causes of discontent, which they attributed to the slow pace of reform. Li, along with the revolutionary elders who still wielded considerable influence, increasingly came to the opposite conclusion, regretting an excessively rapid pace of change for causing the mood of confusion and frustration rife among college students. Closer to the revolutionary elders, especially his mentor Chen Yun, Li was more politically orthodox than some of his contemporaries, favoring greater central economic planning and slower economic growth. Although a committed reformer like Deng, Li noted that economic growth and a successful transition to the market rested on social and political stability. University students and other citizens in Beijing camped out at Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu's death and to protest against those who would slow reform. Their protests, which grew despite government efforts to contain them, called for an end to Political corruption|official corruption and for defense of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Protests also spread through many other cities, including Shanghai and Guangzhou. These protest were occurring at a time when Communism | Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe were collapsing. Conservative PRC leaders were horrified that the Tiananmen protests could topple the government, at a time when, as they argued, political stability was so crucial for economic reforms and modernization. Li was foremost in the stance that the protest was to be put down, by force if necessary, and was instrumental in winning Chairman Deng Xiaoping over to his side. Li declared martial law in Beijing on May 20, 1989. In June, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had opposed Li, was dismissed and arrested and the People's Liberation Army | armed forces were sent into Beijing with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989|loss of hundreds of lives. After the Tiananmen crisis, Li was re-elected into the top policy-decision making body, the Politburo Standing Committee at the First Plenary Session of the 15th CPC Central Committee. It was the third time in succession for Li to be elected into the innermost circle of CPC's third generation of collective leadership since 1987. Li with the support of conservatives like Chen Yun initially attempted to roll back some of the market reforms and increase the role of administrative planning. However, in this effort Li was opposed by the provincial governors and by Deng Xiaoping, and Deng's famous trip to the south in 1992 was considered by many to be a rebuke against economic conservatives. A proposal drafted by Li after Tiananmen to reduce the role of markets faced a large amount of opposition from within the government and was dropped. Over the decade since Li became premier, Mainland China's economy maintained a healthy development momentum, with steady progress in economic restructuring, and fruitful results in opening up to the outside world and particularly in building the "socialist market economy." Meanwhile, the PRC's exchanges and cooperation with foreign countries have greatly been enhanced. Li made a number of visits to foreign countries, contributing to the consolidation and development of friendship and cooperation between the PRC and other countries. Image:China,_Li_Peng_(8).jpg|thumb|250px|Li Peng on a 2002 state visit in Australia He remained premier until 1998, when he was constitutionally limited to two terms. Then he was made the chairman of the National People's Congress. He spent much of his time monitoring what he considers his life's work, the Three Gorges Dam. Like many in his generation, the hydraulic engineer, who spent much of his career presiding over a vast and growing power industry, considered himself a builder and a modernizer. During his tenure as Chairman of the National People's Congress, Li was a strong proponent of rule of law and in increasing the institutional perogatives of the National People's Congress. Although retired and in his mid-seventies, Li retains some influence in the PSC. The current Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China member Luo Gan, is considered to be his prot?g?. Li is one of the most unpopular politicians in China, mainly for his lack of charisma, image as a hardliner, and role in suppressing the Tiananmen square protests. Some opponents of the regime, especially human rights groups in the West, dubbed Li "the Butcher of Beijing" for being instrumental in the crackdown, although the amount of influence Li really had in ordering martial law is not exactly known. In the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen protests, Li tackled the related problems of inflation and social unrest, taking a role in the austerity program, the tight money policy, price controls on many commodity | commodities, higher interest rates, and the cutoff of state loans to the private and cooperative sectors, which succeeded in reducing inflation to very acceptable rates. While Deng and Jiang would later loosen these controls when they were no longer necessary, these policies are seen as vital for the steady, rapid, and uninterrupted economic growth in the years that followed. Thus, the root causes of student discontent, which contributed to an atmosphere of mass-protest and chaos, have largely subsided. Inflation is low; overcrowding in dormitories is a far less pressing matter; the massive migrations from the countryside to the cities in the 1980s, perhaps the largest-scale human migration in history, are far more orderly; the image of the Communist Party has improved, and living standards have generally risen greatly, especially in the booming Pacific coastal cities. The economic success of the years unfolding after the Tiananmen Square protests have perhaps solidified Li's legacy and defended his notion that social stability would be required to ensure a successful transition to a market economy, and this premise is now accepted by the Communist Party.
PremierofChina|pre=Zhao Ziyang|post=Zhu Rongji|begin=1987|end=1998 Category:1928 births|Li Category:CPC leaders Category:Cold War people|Li Category:Li de:Li_Peng ja:李鵬 zh:李鹏 This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Li Peng".
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![[F]](/images/site.gif){kind=small}
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
All informatin on the site is © FamousChinese.com 2002-2005. Last revised: January 2, 2004 Are you interested in our site or/and want to use our information? please read how to contact us and our copyrights. To post your business in our web site? please click here. To send any comments to us, please use the Feedback. To let us provide you with high quality information, you can help us by making a more or less donation: |