China's leader behind crushing 1989 student movement dies at 90

BEIJING: Controversial former Chinese Premier Li Peng, who announced martial law in the midst of a student movement in Beijing in 1989, died on Monday. He was 90.
Releasing the information, state news agency Xinhua described Li as “a loyal communist warrior” and “an outstanding leader of the Communist Party and the state”.
Li represented both the pre-reform and early reform period when he was China’s premier between 1987 and 1998. He is believed by many to be a proponent of crushing the student uprising that led to the killing of a large number of pro-democracy protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
China had initially labelled the students’ movement a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” but later referred to it as “political turmoil”. Former student leaders, including some who live abroad, have called the military crackdown a “massacre”.
Li appeared on national television on May 20, 1989 to officially declare martial law in Beijing.
Li is known to have ignored the advice of the then general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, who was in favour of dealing with the student agitation in a restrained manner. Zhao was later purged for siding with the students’ cause. He died in 2005.
Lee Cheuk-yan, secretary of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, described Li as “a sinner of a thousand years”.
“It is an open secret that Li was the man behind the so-called April 26 People’s Daily editorial denouncing the student protests as premeditated and organised turmoil with anti-party and anti-socialist motives,” Lee was quoted by the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong as saying.
Li, who trained as an electrical engineer in Russia, played a key role in the construction of the world’s largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam. The project became controversial for forced mass evictions of residents along the Yangtze river, as well as environmental risks.
He is survived by two sons and a daughter. His eldest son, Li Xiaopeng, is China’s minister of transport. Li’s daughter, Li Xiaolin, was vice-president of China Datang Corporation, one of the country’s biggest power companies, until she retired in 2018.