Li Peng
4th Premier of the People's Republic of China (1928–2019)

Li Peng (Chinese: 李鹏; pinyin: Lǐ Péng; 20 October 1928 – 22 July 2019) was a Chinese politician who served as the premier of China from 1987 to 1998, and as the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislative body, from 1998 to 2003. For much of the 1990s Li was ranked second in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hierarchy behind then CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin. He retained his seat on the CCP Politburo Standing Committee until his retirement in 2002.
Li was the son of an early Communist revolutionary, Li Shuoxun, who was executed by the Kuomintang. After meeting Zhou Enlai in Sichuan, Li was raised by Zhou and his wife, Deng Yingchao. Li trained to be an engineer in the Soviet Union and worked at an important national power company after returning to China. He escaped the political turmoil of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s due to his political connections and his employment in the company. After Deng Xiaoping became China's leader in the late 1970s, Li took a number of increasingly important and powerful political positions, first becoming Vice Minister and later Minister of Power. In 1983, he became a vice premier. In 1985, he became the minister of the State Education Commission as well as a member of the Politburo and the Party Secretariat.
“Li Peng” enters the record as 4th Premier of the People's Republic of China (1928–2019). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Peng, Premier and People's can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Li Peng” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Peng, Premier and People's provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18301. VIAF identifies the subject as 63858454. The Library of Congress control number is n88284113. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 2019, 1987 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Li Peng” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.