Do we like them?

Do we like Li Keqiang?

Our score: 5 out of 10. Little personal harm found and some real livelihood-focused work, set against his place in a government accused of serious abuses; the file is thin.

Li Keqiang was born in 1955 in Hefei, in China's Anhui province, and rose through the Communist Party to become premier, the country's number two job, for a decade. He stepped down in March 2023 after two terms, in line with term limits, and was widely described as sidelined by Xi Jinping in his later years.

He died suddenly at 68 on 27 October 2023 in Shanghai, with state media reporting a heart attack. Official mourning was tightly managed, and reporting at the time says censors steered public comment towards the apolitical.

Nothing new on him lately: no fresh news or controversy from the last few months turned up, only retrospectives and the odd rehash of his death. That's honestly the whole recent list.

On the harm check, I found no speeches of his campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants. But Radio Free Asia reported that Uyghurs and rights groups link him to Xinjiang policies, including internment, and say he'll be remembered for repression. He was part of a collective government, and where you land depends on how much weight you put on that.

The good-stuff column is mostly about candour. In 2020 he told a press conference that about 600 million Chinese earned roughly 1,000 yuan a month, a figure that cut against the triumphant poverty narrative and drew debate over how to read it. The Irish Times obituary calls him the moderate leader who never really was.