Bad Cop/Good Cop: Li Peng (1928-2019)
July 29 2019
SAFELY OUT OF POWER, the former Chinese Premier Li Peng, who died last week, quickly became the punchline of all kinds of samizdat jokes that stressed not his callous disregard for the lives of protesting students, but his stupidity. That late-blossoming reputation for incompetence must have been galling for a technocrat responsible for some of China’s most prestigious engineering projects, but after all the country had been through, it felt pleasing to be able to mock him as the scowling, incredulous face of a cruel and remote gerontocracy whose time had now surely passed.
And so, by the time he had retired, he was regarded not only as the Butcher of Beijing, but also the Botcher of the Yangtze. As a hydropower engineer, he was the major driving force behind the Three Gorges Dam, that Promethean attempt to harness the devastating power of China’s longest river. Li’s successor Wen Jiabao wasted little time castigating the project and the way it was handled. President Hu Jintao didn’t even bother attending the ceremony marking the dam’s completion.
If China was about to go through one of its periodic “reversals of verdicts” designed to right the country’s historical course and brand events such as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution as deviations, Li’s head was expected to be the first on the chopping block. So alarmed was he by the risks to his legacy, he chose to publish memoirs that essentially said he was only obeying the orders of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. The Three Gorges, he wrote, was not only launched on the instruction of Deng, but was also the dream of several generations of Chinese leaders, including Sun Yatsen and Chairman Mao. Had he been permitted to publish his Tian’anmen diaries, his interpretation of those tumultuous events in June 1989 would presumably have been along the same lines.
But perhaps Li’s biggest vulnerability was his children, who have been accused of enriched themselves in a series of dodgy enterprises, most of which were related to the state-controlled electric power industry. Li’s daughter, Li Xiaolin, was even implicated in the Panama Papers scandal.
In his heyday as Chinese Premier from 1987 to 1998, Li served as Bad Cop to Good Cops like Zhao Ziyang and Zhu Rongji, and worked to undermine progressives and promote hardline allies like Luo Gan, China’s feared security chief and Li’s chief lieutenant during the Tiananmen protests. Li was another authoritarian foil for optimistic Western liberals who once liked to believe that the arc of Chinese history was bending towards a kind of democracy.
Li was part of a “good cop bad cop” routine that dominated Chinese politics for so many decades, with all society’s hopes resting on the presence of a “reformer” who had little power but served to reassure the public that the country is going in a vaguely liberal direction. Hu Jintao had his Wen Jiabao. Chairman Mao himself had Zhou Enlai. The dynamic now seems to have ended: current President Xi Jinping is his own good cop and bad cop - the dictator and the reformer, the alpha and the omega, the yin and the yang. Xi has sucked all the life out of the Party, and everyone trembles and twitches under his voluminous, overwhelming shadow.
