Li Changchun - Biography

Biography

Li Changchun was born in February 1944 in modern-day Dalian, Liaoning, then administered by the Empire of Japan as "Dairen", Kwantung Leased Territory. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1965 and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the Harbin Institute of Technology in 1966. In 1983, at age 39, he became the youngest mayor and Party secretary of a major city, of Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning. In 1987, he became governor of the province, a post he kept until 1990. As governor, mainland China's first expressway was built in the province, linking the cities of Shenyang and Dalian.

After Zhao Ziyang was purged from the party leadership in 1989 during the fallout from the Tiananmen Square protests that same year, Li was initially also thought to have been removed from the leadership because he was a supporter of Zhao. Li's appearance on state television weeks later showed that this was not the case. Li served briefly as the Party chief in the agricultural province of Henan in the 1990s. Jiang Zemin sent him to serve as Guangdong Party Secretary, where he cracked down on corruption to "put the house in order."

Li was promoted to the Politburo of the Communist Party of China in 1998, and made a member of its Standing Committee after General Secretary Jiang Zemin's retirement in 2002.

There was a chance in 2002 that Li may have become premier, but they were damaged by some of the enemies of his political allies, Jiang Zemin and Li Peng. For example, Li was caught up in an "export rebate fraud" scandal uncovered in the Guangdong coastal city of Shantou in 2000, and criticized by Zhu Rongji for failing to detect the scam. Li was also harmed by his extension of political favors to Jiang Zemin's female friends. Li recommended Huang Liman, who was considered incompetent by other officials, and her husband had business interests in Shenzhen, a special economic zone near to Hong Kong. Although Li helped Huang to please Jiang, his enemies still used it against him.

Jiang nevertheless made sure to secure Li's promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee, though in 2002 he was "the sole member of the PBSC without a specific post in the cabinet of Party bureaucracy," and was initially simply charged with supervising the Party organs that deal with propaganda and ideology.

In October 2007, the Communist Party of China announced that Li would serve another term as Propaganda Chief.

There were high hopes among some in media circles that Li would signal a more liberal change from the strictures of former propaganda chief Ding Guangen. Li had made a major speech advocating that media stay "close to the public" and to real events, "instead of mechanically following Party directives." The hopes were short-lived however, though, after the Central Propaganda Department began closing newspapers, firing journalists, and would not allow foreign companies to produce content for TV stations in China. Many editors were punished and Li Changchun "started sounding and acting like another Ding Guangen."