CONFIDENTIAL
LI PENG
A Vice-Premier.
Member of the Politburo and Secretariat
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee.
Minister of the State Education Commission.
1. Li Peng was born on 20 October 1928 in Shanghai.
father was a Communist guerilla who was killed by the
Nationalists in 1931. He was taken under the wing of the
late Zhou Enlai and his wife Deng Yingchao.
His
2. In addition to his relative youth, Li Peng has the
technical expertise demanded of the rising generation of
leaders. He was an engineer, and trained at the Moscow
Dynamics Institute from 1948 to 1955. He was a leader of
Chinese students in the USSR and may have met Gorbachev
who was a Soviet student leader in Moscow. He is
probably also more positive about Sino-Soviet relations
than Deng Xiaoping. He has wide experience of the power
industry, and while Vice-Minister of Water Conservancy
and Power from 1982 to 1983 he was in charge of the
Guangdong Nuclear project.
connection in 1982.
He visited Britain in this
FC6AAM
CONFIDENTIAL