Photo/Illutration Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visits a Toyota Motor Corp. plant in Tomakomai, Hokkaido, in May 2018 along with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, far left, and Akio Toyoda, far right, company president. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

In a nutshell, Li Keqiang, the former Chinese premier who has just died suddenly at the age of 68, was good for business.

His death from a heart attack, announced by Beijing on Oct. 27, came as a shock to many in the Japanese business community, seeing as Li had been China’s top economic official for a decade.

Li championed improved economic ties between Japan and China even when other issues, such as the territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, threatened to derail friendly relations.

In a statement issued on the day of Li’s death, the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in China said: “We strongly felt Li’s earnest expectations for Japan-China cooperation. We appreciate the many contributions he made toward friendship and exchange between Japan and China as well as economic cooperation.”

Li was regarded by many in the Japanese government and business sector as a politician with a bright future.

He visited Japan in 1985 as a high-ranking member of a Communist Youth League delegation from China. When he was the top party official in Liaoning province around 2004 and 2005, Japanese business leaders made a point of visiting him.

In 2012, he became the No. 2 man within the Chinese Communist Party and was named premier the following year. For the next decade, Li oversaw economic policy in China.

Holding a doctorate in economics, Li tried to increase economic activity in the private sector rather than rely on the government’s strength through public works projects.

Many Japanese business leaders held high expectations for what came to be known as “Liconomics.”

In 2015, Li proposed a strategy for China to shift from mass production as the world’s factory by 2025 and focus on developing advanced technology.

According to a Chinese government source, Li wanted to emulate Japanese manufacturing prowess by focusing on improved quality.

In conjunction with a visit to Japan in 2018, Li contributed a piece to The Asahi Shimbun in which he wrote, “If the relationship between the two largest economic powers in Asia of China and Japan developed into a stable one, it would benefit not only the peoples of those two nations but would also promote world peace and stability as well as global development and prosperity.”

One stop during that Japan trip was a Toyota Motor Corp. plant in Tomakomai, Hokkaido. He peppered company officials with questions about how self-driving technology could be applied to the home delivery and transport sectors.

Increasing political distance between Li and Chinese President Xi Jinping probably was the reason Li’s manufacturing proposal for 2025 was not implemented.

With Li gone, few people in the higher echelons of the Chinese leadership share his pro-Japan stance.

“Li’s experience as a younger official in the 1980s and ’90s when he observed what Japan was undertaking likely affected him deeply,” said a high-ranking official of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. “But now we see almost no one in either Japan or China with the willingness to serve as a conduit between the two nations. As the thinking about economic security spreads, it will become increasingly difficult to build a bilateral relationship based on the economy as in the past.”

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