Wan Li (1916–1996)

Chinese communist politician. Wan was made party leader in Anhui province in 1977 and successfully instituted a programme of market-centred economic reforms that attracted the attention of the new ‘paramount leader’, Deng Xiaoping. Wan was rewarded, in 1980, with a place in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Central Committee and was made vice premier, responsible chiefly for agriculture. In 1982 he became a member of the CCP's controlling Politburo and became a particularly close ally of Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang.

Wan's relative political liberalism prevented him from rising further. In November 1987, the conservative power-broker Chen Yun insisted that the more cautious Li Peng should become prime minister rather than Wan, when Zhao Ziyang took over as party leader, and Wan was moved to become chair of the National People's Congress (parliament). During the May–June 1989 political crisis caused by pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Wan's role was equivocal. Away on an official visit when martial law was imposed, he flew back to China, apparently to provide backing to Zhao Ziyang's bid to reach a non-military solution. However, Wan was detained en route in Shanghai by local party leader Jiang Zemin, and was persuaded to lie low and rest for ‘health reasons’.

Born in Sichuan province, Wan joined the CCP in 1936 and studied in France before the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. After Liberation, he became a Communist bureaucrat, gaining a reputation as a liberal reformer. Close to Liu Shaoqi, whom he accompanied on a state visit to Korea in 1963, he was ‘purged’ in the Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, when he was placed on mass trial and denounced as a ‘bourgeois reactionary’. Rehabilitated in 1971, he was briefly purged again in 1976, when Jiang Qing's ‘Gang of Four’ were in the ascendancy.

Wan's son-in-law, Li Ruihuan (1935– ), who established a reputation between 1982–89 as a reformist mayor of Tianjin, China's third largest city, rose above Wan in the post-Tiananmen reconstruction of the CCP Poliliburo. He was promoted to its six-member inner Standing Committee and given charge, within the Secretariat, of the CCP ideology portfolio.