Prime minister of China and a member of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee. He served as chief of staff to Xi Jinping between 2004 and 2007, when Xi was still a provincial governor. Xi broke convention by promoting Li and other loyalists in 2022; they have strong ties to the leader but weak links with each other. Li was given a party commission to lead in early 2023.
Li has since regained some of the responsibilities stripped from his predecessor as prime minister, including some say over economic policy. New rules allow him to summon bureaucrats at will and to hold study sessions on topics of his choosing; Xi is the only other leader who has such latitude. In July 2025 Li went to the BRICS summit in Brazil in Xi's place—Xi's first absence from the gathering in 12 years. In November 2025 he visited Zambia, the highest-ranking Chinese visitor in more than 18 years, to oversee a $1.4bn upgrade of the Tazara railway.
In March 2025 he announced that China's GDP growth target for the year would be "around 5%". On March 5th 2026, at the opening of the National People's Congress (~2,800 delegates), he announced a target of 4.5-5% for 2026—the lowest since 1991. He promised to fight unfair competition with "greater intensity", raising quality standards and enforcing laws against predatory pricing, and pledged a "reasonable, modest rebound" in consumer prices.
In 2023 he praised platform companies for their "increasingly prominent" role in demand and employment, reversing a crackdown on the gig economy that had begun in 2020. In March 2025 he said "profit-driven law enforcement" had to stop, referring to a practice known as "fishing in distant seas" in which police from poor, rural areas slap charges on citizens in distant jurisdictions to raise revenue.
In January 2025 he met Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek.
I've already told you more than I know.