Former Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang has died at the age of 68. He was prime minister under President Xi Jinping from 2013 to early this year. According to Chinese official media, he died of a heart attack.

Although Li was China’s second-in-command for ten years as Prime Minister, he was unable to leave his mark on Chinese politics. It has been increasingly outflanked by President Xi Jinping, who has seized all power for himself.

Li was known as a supporter of economic and political reforms, but none of that happened as President Xi appointed hardliners to more and more key positions.

However, Li attracted attention in 2020 with his statement that more than 600 million Chinese, nearly half the population, should live on less than 130 euros a month. This led to a debate in China about income inequality and poverty.

But some of Lee’s other statements were censored by the Communist Party. This happened, for example, in a speech last year in which he praised former President Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s. Deng, among other things, separated the power of the Communist Party from that of the government, something that Xi overturned.

In March this year, after the end of his second term as Prime Minister, Lee resigned from his post. In his farewell he said the enigmatic words: “While men work, the sky watches. The sky has eyes.” A video of this appeared on social media, but the ruling was ignored in state media.

According to Chinese dissident Wang Juntao, a former friend of Li’s who now lives in exile in the United States, the statement was a veiled attack on Xi Jinping. “This is the voice of a defeated man, hoping that some god will prove him right,” Wang said. In the British newspaper The Guardian.

In the same article, Chen Daoyin, a former political science professor, described Li as “the weakest prime minister since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949.” According to Chen, Li had the ability, but not the courage, to prevent Xi from seizing all power.

Li was succeeded as prime minister in March by his namesake, Li Qiang, a confidant of the president.