Background
Wan Li was born in 1916 of a poor peasant family in Dongping county in Shandong province in north China.
Wan Li was born in 1916 of a poor peasant family in Dongping county in Shandong province in north China.
As a youth he struggled with meager family earnings to gain entrance to a teacher training school from which he graduated in 1933. In 1936 he joined the Chinese Communist Party and rose thereafter to become a local Party organizer. By 1946 Wan Li was the political commissar for a branch unit of the Second Field Army system commanded by Deng Xiaoping and Liu Bocheng. Deng was then the chief political commissar and thus the overall supervisor for the Second Field Army.
This was the beginning of a long close association between the two. Wan Li followed Deng/Liu’s army into Nanjing in 1949 and became the city’s economic construction chief after defeating the Nationalists. As Deng-Liu s army marched into southwest China, Wan Li followed and emerged as the Party leader responsible for economic reconstruction of the entire southwest China. In 1952 Wan Li was promoted to Beijing to head the central government’s urban reconstruction. By 1958-1959 he was the deputy mayor and party secretary for the city of Beijing and remained involved in the Beijing municipal government until 1966 when the Cultural Revolution was launched by Mao Zedong and the radicals.
From September 1966 to March 1971, Wan Li was denounced by the Red Guards as “antirevolutionary” and was forced to be removed from the Beijing municipal party office. He was banished to the countryside to do manual labor. He returned to Beijing after March 1971 when Premier Zhou Enlai brought back the power to the exiled veteran Party leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and Wan Li. Wan Li returned to the Beijing municipal Party secretariat. Then, in 1975, Deng Xiaoping assumed the major responsibilities of the premier's office as Zhou Enlai was hospitalized and was unable to carry on the daily central government activities. In 1975, Deng then appointed Wan Li to the position of minister for China’s rail roads. As Mao became incapacitated and the radical leaders began to seize control of the central government, Deng Xiaoping was purged again in April 1976. Wan Li also lost his ministerial position.
With the arrest of the radical leaders after Mao's death in the fall of 1976, Deng Xiaoping returned to power in 1977 and Wan Li was brought back as the deputy minister for transportation. In 1977 Wan Li was named the provincial Party secretary and governor of Anhui province. It was there that Wan Li, a man from a poor peasant background, introduced experimental agricultural reform in Anhui later known as the rural responsibility system under which peasants were permitted to manage their land and farms on the basis of Axed output quota contracts for each household. Wan Li’s successful experiment in Anhui became the key to the 1978 Party decision for nationwide rural reform.
The success of the responsibility system in the countryside enabled the reformers to move a step further to “legitimize” and “institutionalize” the widely accepted Baogatt Daohu's or simply Da Baogan's system of leasing land owned collectively by the townsliip under contract. This step had been termed the “second land reform” or the “decollectivization” of the communes in the countryside. Party Document No. 1 of 1984 extended the duration of household contracts from a period of 3 to 5 years to 15 years. The 15-year extension of land contracts not only signified to peasants the legitimacy of the responsibility of the system, but also gave them a sense of permanence and stability, alleviating the fear that the leased-land contracts, the Da Baogan's might be subject to shifting political winds. In addition, the longer period for leased land provided the peasants with wa greater incentive to invest in the land and to make other improvements needed to enable the land to be continuously productive.
In 1980 Wan Li was elected to the Party's central secretariat and became a vice-premier in the state council, responsible to the national agricultural commission and other economic reform matters. In 1982 he was elected to the Party's Politburo, the apex of political power. At the Seventh National People’s Congress in 1988 he was chosen to the chairmanship of its standing committee.
Wan Li often articulated his thoughts on political structural reform, a popular topic in the mid-1980s. For instance, as vice-premier and Politburo member he spoke on the policy-making process, which he advocated based on computerized quantitative input-output analysis, rather than on an individual leader's subjective judgment. He deplored the fact that China had not yet established a policy-making procedure that included research support, consultation with experts, evaluation and feedback before a policy was adopted. Instead, Wan Li pointed out, China had a system of policy-making by intuition or osmosis. As a first step, he proposed the creation of Ma political climate of democracy, equality, and consultation. He argued that policy issues must go through three stages or processes: research, decision, and implementation. He seemed to stress the need at the research stage for permitting free airing of views within certain limits. He also carefully pointed out that these free discussions could not be allowed to deviate from the ideological guidance of Marxism.
However, Wan Li, then chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, failed to play a role in the 1989 Tiananmen student demonstration. He was visiting the United States when the upheaval erupted. On May 20, 1989, at the height of the student's demonstration, the Party's Politburo Standing Committee members made the decision to declare martial law, presumably at the prodding of Deng Xiaoping. The Politburo action raised a constitutional controversy in that the standing committee of the NPC was not involved for Article 67(20) of the 1982 state constitution stipulated that the only organ authorized to declare and enforce martial law would be the NPC’s standing committee, not the Party’s Politburo.
Evidently Wan Li had been receiving conflicting cables from the Chinese leaders: one from Zhao Ziyang, then the Party chief, ordering Wan Li to return and another from Li Peng, the premier, appealing to Wan Li to continue his visits in the United States and not return to Beijing. Wan Li then decided to terminate his travels in the United States and returned to Shanghai instead of Beijing for reasons of health. By not being present in Beijing he avoided involvement in the political turmoil, for he could have invoked the state constitution by convening the NPC's standing committee with the move, as urged by many, to nullify martial law or at least to call for a review of the martial law declaration. Wan Li’s return might have been motivated by his desire to not get involved in convening the NPC session for reasons of his long association with Deng Xiaoping and his desire to maintain that close relationship.
Wan Li retired in 1992 and he became one of China’s elder statesmen.
CCP 11th Central Committee, member Secretary CCP 11th Central Committee. Politburo CCP Central Committee and member Secretary 1982, 1987.