Premier Li Is Cautious Bureaucrat;Soviet-Trained Electrical Engineer Promised `Measured' Changes
Premier Li Peng, who has taken a consistently hard line with protesters in Beijing these last few days, is a cautious technocrat who favors slow and controlled change in China's political and economic spheres.</br></br>The adopted son of the late premier Zhou Enlai, Li has spent most of his career in the electrical power industry, rising to prominence in recent years as part of a sweeping high-level effort to bring younger, more technically competent men and women into the country's leadership.</br></br>In the past few years, the short, pudgy native of Sichuan province has earned a reputation as a colorless-almost plodding-bureaucrat who is hard-working and strong on technical expertise. As premier, he is the second highest ranking leader after the party chief.</br></br>If Li, 60, emerges as the new strongman behind senior leader Deng Xiaoping as a result of the current crisis, not only will the chances of radical reform diminish, but more serious questions will arise about the direction of the top leadership, according to some observers. "I have no sense that he has any particular leadership vision," Harry Harding, a senior fellow and China specialist at the Brookings Institution, said of Li.</br></br>Li already has made clear that China does not intend to copy the extraordinary political changes initiated in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev. In a two-hour televised news conference last month, Li said that while China favors "democracy" and "political reform," such change in China will be part of a measured, controlled process.