BEIJING (AP) – Li Peng, a former hard-line Chinese premier best known for announcing martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, has died. He was 90.
The official Xinhua News Agency said Li died Monday of an unspecified illness.
Li, a cautious, uninspiring figure, was a keen political infighter who spent two decades at the pinnacle of power before retiring in 2002. He leaves behind a legacy of extended and broad-based economic growth coupled with authoritarian political controls.
While broadly disliked by the public, he oversaw China’s reemergence from post-Tiananmen isolation to rising global diplomatic and economic clout, a development he celebrated in often defiantly nationalistic public statements.
“Ridding themselves from the predicament of imperialist bullying, humiliation and oppression, the calamity-trodden Chinese people have since stood up,” Li said in 1995 in a speech for the Oct. 1 anniversary of the 1949 revolution that brought the ruling Communist Party to power.