Esteemed economist passes away in Beijing

Li Yining, a pioneering economist renowned for his contributions to China's economic reform, passed away on Monday night in Beijing at the age of 92, a statement on the official website of Peking University said late on Monday.

The revered economist, who was a senior professor at PKU and honorary dean of its Guanghua School of Management, passed away at Peking Union Medical College Hospital at 7:31 pm on Monday, the statement said.

Li was also a member of the Communist Party of China, and a former member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference's National Committee. His passing away is being widely mourned, particularly by those familiar with his contributions to China's economic reforms.

As an economist, Li was one of China's earliest policy advocates for economic reform, and is respected for being a leading voice for advocating State-owned enterprise reform, his advocacy for better leveraging the role of China's private businesses and his help in establishing China's stock market in the early 1990s.

During the preliminary phase when China's market-oriented economic reform took early shape in the 1980s, Li was among the first to put forward the idea of introducing a joint-stock shareholding system to rev up the economy and solve pressing employment issues at the time.

In the late 1990s, he led the drafting of China's first version of the Securities Law and was a major advisor for its subsequent revisions.

According to a previous report by China's Caijing Magazine, Li summarized his major achievements in participating in China's policymaking on four fronts: participating in legislation, promoting reform of China's stock market, poverty alleviation and encouraging growth of private business.

"It falls on our generation to make scholarly contributions to China's reform agenda and the wider, ambitious modernization drive," Li said during an earlier interview with Caijing.

According to public information, Li was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. He graduated from the department of economics at Peking University in 1955 and stayed at the university as a teacher. His major field of research included comparative economic history, China's macroeconomic issues and socialist political economy.

In 2018, when celebrating the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up, Li — as an active advocate of economic system reform — was among 100 figures awarded "reform pioneer" medals.