Li Yining, a Chinese economist known for driving economic reforms in the country and who was instrumental in establishing the stock market, died Monday at 92.
(Bloomberg) — Li Yining, a Chinese economist known for driving economic reforms in the country and who was instrumental in establishing the stock market, died Monday at 92.
Li, who was a senior professor at Peking University and the founding dean of the Guanghua School of Management, passed away due to an unspecified illness at a hospital in Beijing, the university said in a statement on Monday. Many of his students have become senior officials, including Premier Li Keqiang, who completed a PhD in economics under his supervision.
Dubbed “Stock Holding Li” or “Mr Stockmarket” for his bold advocacy of introducing a joint-stock shareholding system to reform state-owned enterprises in the 1980s, Li was regarded as having provided a theoretical basis for China’s stock markets, which began in 1990.
Li was also known for his support for the private economy. He advocated giving private firms the same status as state-owned firms in market competition, which led to a groundbreaking policy in 2005 that widened private companies’ market access in industries like finance and telecommunications.
Born in 1930 in eastern China’s Nanjing city, Li began teaching at Peking University, his alma mater in 1955. In 1957, he was criticized during the “anti-Rightist” campaign and demoted to be a clerk in the economic department’s information office. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent down to the countryside to work on farms in Jiangxi and a rural part of Beijing for years, before returning to teaching at the university from 1976.
“During the six years I was in the countryside, my views about China’s economy changed,” Li told the New York Times in a profile in 1989. “The whole of China’s economy was almost destroyed. That was when I knew that China should not follow the Soviet path. At that time they could prevent people from writing, but they could not stop people from thinking.”
Those ideas were again criticized twice during the 1980s, according to the New York Times, a tumultuous period when Deng Xiaoping’s market economy reforms were met with much pushback and controversy. Li was a member of the standing committee of the national legislature, the National People’s Congress, between 1988 and 2002.
–With assistance from Tom Hancock.
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