China's Ex-Premier Li Keqiang, 68, Suffers Fatal Heart Attack—State Media

Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang died early Friday morning, according to Chinese state media.

The 68-year-old had been on holiday in Shanghai when he suffered a heart attack on Thursday, succumbing at 12:10 a.m. despite "all-out efforts to rescue him," officials said.

Li served as China's seventh premier from 2013 to March 2023. He was widely viewed as an unassuming, reformist-minded technocrat who oversaw the country's vast bureaucracy during the later stages of China's economic boom and into the COVID pandemic.

The State Council Information Office, which handles information inquiries related to the Chinese central government, did not immediately respond to Newsweek's request for comment.

U.S. Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, on X (formerly Twitter) expressed his condolences to the Chinese government, Li's family, and the Chinese people.

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, an agency tasked with handling the island's relations with China, also offered condolences. It said it would be watching related developments closely. Beijing claims Taiwan as its territory, though the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government has never ruled there.

During his time as China's No. 2, Li largely deferred to President Xi Jinping's more authoritarian approach to governance and saw his role and influence diminished as Xi consolidated power.

After Li stepped down, he was replaced by Premier Li Qiang, a close ally of Xi's and the former Shanghai party leader who championed the two-month lockdown that gripped the financial hub early in 2022.

Li Keqiang's expression of concern over the toll Xi's "zero-COVID" rolling lockdowns had on the economy was seen as a rare departure from the party line. This was followed soon after by anti-lockdown protests in major cities from late 2021 to early 2022.

Li's death comes at a time of political unease in China amid a slowing economy, reeling property market, and the removal of several high-ranking officials.

Speculation is already swirling about whether Xi's hand might be behind Li's sudden death.

The opaqueness of China's political system is why many people are reflexively questioning Li's official cause of death, tweeted Yaqiu Wang, Freedom House research director for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan."

Despite its total control over China, the CCP "can't do one simple thing: having people trust what it says," she added.

Li had little political influence and had posed no potential challenge to Xi's power, observed Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society think tank.

"Xi knows about Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. Why risk unrest and instability?" he said.

Zhou, who was China's first premier, and Hu were popular, reformist-minded deputies whose deaths saw Chinese turn out en masse to mourn. Hu's galvanized students into the weeks-long demonstrations that the military crushed at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Some netizens appear to be using Li's death as an opportunity to express dissent. In an apparent swipe at Xi, the Mandopop song "Too Bad It Wasn't You" by singer Fish Leong was circulating on Chinese social media platform Weibo before being scrubbed by the country's censors.

"The timing of Li's death is not good for the leadership. Some people already think it was an assassination, while others will likely conclude that Li's death was somehow related to disappointment with how Xi treated him or the general direction of the country," Joseph Torigian, a Chinese politics researcher at Stanford University's Hoover History Lab, told Reuters.

Update, 10/27/23, 5:11 a.m. ET: This story has been updated with further details.