China's former premier Li Keqiang dead at 68

Once viewed as a top Communist Party leadership contender, Li was sidelined in recent years by President Xi Jinping, who tightened his grip on power and steered the world's second-largest economy in a more statist direction.

The elite Peking University-educated economist was once viewed as a top Communist Party leadership contender, but became increasingly sidelined by Xi in recent years.

"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."

He was born in Anhui province in eastern China, a poor farming area where his father was an official and where he was sent to toil in the fields during the Cultural Revolution.

He memorably said in 2020 that over 600 million people in China earned less than the equivalent of $US140 per month, sparking a wider debate on poverty and income inequality.

In a 2010 speech, Li acknowledged challenges including too much reliance on investment to drive China's economic growth, weak consumer spending and a wealth gap between prosperous eastern cities and the poor countryside, home to 800 million people.

Li was seen as a possible candidate to revive then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping's market-oriented reforms of the 1980s that started China's boom. But he was known for an easygoing style, not the hard-driving impatience of Zhu Rongji, the premier in 1998-2003 who ignited the construction and export booms by forcing painful reforms that cut millions of jobs from state industry.

Li was believed to have supported the China 2030 report released by the World Bank and a Cabinet research body in 2012 that called for dramatic changes to reduce the dominance of state industry and rely more on market forces.

with AP