China’s former premier Li Keqiang died on Friday after suffering a heart attack at the age of 68.
Li suffered the sudden heart attack on Thursday in Shanghai where he had been “resting”, and passed away in the early hours of Friday despite “all-out efforts” to revive him, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
He was the second-most powerful person in the Chinese Communist Party and head of China’s cabinet under president Xi Jinping for a decade until stepping down in March last year.
“No matter how the international winds and clouds change, China will unswervingly expand its opening up,” Li said at his last public appearance in a press conference in March.
“The Yangtze River and the Yellow River will not flow backwards.”
The career bureaucrat was sidelined by Mr Xi in recent years, who tightened his own grip on power and steered the world’s second-largest economy in a more statist direction.
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