Former Chinese premier Li Peng - known as the "Butcher of Beijing" for his role in the Tiananmen Square crackdown - has died at the age of 90, state media said Tuesday.
Li died of an unspecified illness in Beijing after he failed to respond to medical treatment late Monday, the official Xinhua news agency said. The ex-premier had previously battled bladder cancer.
Li gained notoriety worldwide as one of the key architects of the brutal breakup of mass pro-democracy demonstrations in the capital on June 4, 1989, and stayed at the top of the Communist regime for more than a decade, while remaining a hated symbol of the repression until his death.
After vast crowds of students, workers and others had been encamped for weeks in Tiananmen Square to demand change, Li proclaimed martial law on May 20, 1989.
Two weeks later, on the night of June 3-4, the military put a bloody end to the protests, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians - by some estimates more than 1,000.
Though the decision to send in the troops was a collective one, Li was widely held responsible for the bloody crackdown.
Its taint trailed him through to the end of his official political career in 2003, with his trips abroad generating widespread protests - such as in Paris in 1996, where more than 2,000 took to the streets to decry his welcome by president Jacques Chirac.
Nevertheless, he remained a member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee for 15 years and for most of the 1990s ranked number two behind then Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
He held the premiership for 11 years until 1998, and was chairman of China's Communist-controlled parliament until 2003.
Adopted son
Li spent his childhood in the shadow of Zhou Enlai, China's premier for nearly three decades and possibly the Communist Party's most skilled politician.
Born in 1928 in the south western province of Sichuan, Li was adopted at the age of three by Zhou after his Communist father became a "martyr of the Revolution", killed by the Kuomintang in 1931.
He joined the Communist Party at the age of 17 and was dispatched to Moscow in 1948 for seven years of hydropower engineering study.
After returning to China, his high-level family contacts allowed him to escape the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and to rise quickly through the energy ministry, before becoming premier himself in 1987.
A conservative economic planner thought to retain faith in the old Soviet style of central planning, he was a key player in the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze river – the world's largest in capacity.
When pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square threatened the elite in 1989, he and other hardliners outmanoeuvred dovish officials, with Li afterwards frequently defending the decision to fire on the demonstrators as a "necessary" step.
"Without these measures China would have faced a situation worse than in the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe," he said on a tour of Austria in 1994 as his international pariah status started to wear off.
