Legacy
Although retired and in his mid-seventies, Li retains some influence in the PSC. The current Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China member Luo Gan, is considered to be his protégé.
Li is widely believed to be one of the most unpopular politicians in China, mainly for his lack of charisma, image has a hardliner, and role in justifying the suppression Tiananmen square protests. Some opponents of the regime dubbed Li "the Butcher of Beijing" for being instrumental in the crackdown, although the amount of influence Li really had in ordering martial law is not exactly known.
Nevertheless, the economic success of the years unfolding after the Tiananmen Square protests have perhaps solidified Li's legacy and defended his notion that "social stability" would be required to ensure a successful transition to a market economy, and this premise is now accepted by the Communist Party.
In the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen protests, Li tackled the related problems of inflation and social unrest, taking a role in the austerity program, the tight money policy, price controls on many commodities, higher interest rates, and the cutoff of state loans to the private and cooperative sectors, which succeeded in reducing inflation to very acceptable rates. While Deng and Jiang would later loosen these controls when they were no longer necessary, these policies are seen as vital for the steady, rapid, and uninterrupted economic growth in the years that followed.
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