Li Peng: Chinese premier forever associated with the Tiananmen Square massacre

The ‘butcher of Beijing’ made the key decisions that led to the bloody crackdown of June 1989

Li Peng was reviled by survivors and witnesses but was always protected by the Communist Party (AFP)

As the Chinese premier who oversaw the deadly 1989 crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Li Peng, who has died aged 90, earned the epithet the “butcher of Beijing” from human rights groups.

A protege of Zhou Enlai, who became the first premier of the People’s Republic of China after Communist victory in 1949, Li proved a durable political operator amid the tumult of Mao Zedong’s rule and for long afterwards. He was a Russian-trained technocrat who spent decades as a power-plant and central planning administrator, jobs that shaped China’s economic transformation and aided his rise in the Communist Party’s hierarchy.

Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping hand-selected Li to join the highest echelons of the Communist Party in 1987, naming him premier. Li served until 1998 and then was chair of China’s top legislative body, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, until 2003. He was at the forefront of Chinese politics for decades, but his name is inextricably linked to the military assault on unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square on 3 and 4 June 1989.

As premier, Li was the face of a group of hardliners who saw the student-led movement against one-party rule as a threat to their authority and national stability. It was Li who declared martial law, paving the way for troops to enter the city in late May 1989. He also played a key role in the decision to send troops to clear the square, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, as they went.

The late 1980s found China’s leaders split on where to take the country, with reformers such as Secretary General Hu Yaobang and the man who succeeded him, Zhao Ziyang, pushing economic and political liberalisation and others, including Li, pushing for a more centralised, state-led approach.

In 1986, students in cities across China demonstrated to demand political reform. Hu was blamed for the unrest and ousted as general secretary. When Hu died, in April 1989, thousands took to the streets in a display of grief that morphed into mass protest. They demanded checks on government corruption, political reform and talks with top officials. The protesters set up outside the Great Hall of the People, on the western edge of Tiananmen Square, and eventually started a hunger strike.

On 18 May, as the standoff deepened, Li met with student leaders for a nationally televised dialogue. In footage that shocked the nation, Li, looking imperious in his tunic-like Mao suit, was scolded and interrupted by students, including a hunger striker still in his hospital gown.

The next day, Zhao and Li went to meet with students in the square. Zhao tried to broker peace by praising the students’ good intentions, but he urged them to end their strike and leave the square.

But with thousands marching and holding hunger strikes in the capital and many more flooding the streets of Shanghai in a show of solidarity, Li declared martial law on 20 May, ordering tanks and troops into the capital. Beijing residents erected barricades to block their advance.

In the days that followed, more than 1 million people defiantly took to Beijing’s streets with the rallying cry “Li Peng must step down”.

At a meeting of top leaders, Li is said to have made a case for clearing the square. The next day, troops advanced. For his role as the face of the massacre that followed, Li is reviled by survivors, witnesses and many others in China, but over the decades he was protected and promoted by a party unwilling to revisit the decision to use force against Chinese civilians.

Li was born in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in 1928. His father, Li Shouxun, was a writer who took part in an uprising against the Kuomintang authorities in 1927 and was arrested and executed in 1930. Party lore holds that Li was later taken in by Zhou Enlai, who was a friend of his father’s.

Li’s ties to Zhou made him a standout member of China’s “red second generation”, a group of the children of revolutionary heroes that also includes China’s current president, Xi Jinping. Li was sent to Yan’an, a communist base, for schooling, and later studied hydroelectric engineering at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. While in the Soviet Union, he was president of the Association of Chinese Students in the USSR, which helped him to forge connections with many who went on to hold important government positions.

Li returned to China in 1955 as the country was making the leap toward industrialisation. He was first sent to run power plants in the northeast. Then, in the mid-1960s, he was assigned to run Beijing’s electric power administration.

The young technocrat’s red pedigree protected him from the bloody purges of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. In 1979 he was appointed a vice minister of the power industry, followed rapidly by membership on the powerful Central Committee and the ruling Politburo. By the restless spring of 1989, he was serving his first term as China’s premier.

After his time as premier ended, he became chair of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, overseeing economic changes that helped many, including members of his family, get rich. He backed the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, a massive hydroelectric project that spanned the Yangtze River, displaced an estimated 1 million people and was dogged by allegations of environmental destruction and rampant corruption. He maintained a role in China’s power sector, eventually handing major monopolies to his children, who continue to wield influence.

He is survived by his wife, Zhu Lin, and three children.

Li Peng, former Chinese premier, born 20 October 1928, died 22 July 2019

Additional reporting by Amber Ziye Wang and Gerry Shih

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