Chinese Premier Reappears in Public After 7-Week Hiatus

Premier Li Peng, smiling and generally looking healthy, reappeared in public Monday after being sidelined for seven weeks with an illness widely believed to have been a mild heart attack.

Li presided over a welcoming ceremony in the Great Hall of the People for visiting Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed. He then held 80 minutes of formal talks with Mahathir, according to the official New China News Agency.

Some reporters who were present in the Great Hall or who viewed close-ups of the premier on videotape said he looked as if he may have lost weight. At one point, after sitting down, Li dropped his controlled smile, and for that brief moment he looked tired. In general, however, his appearance and manner were virtually unchanged from before his illness.

When Li, 64, first dropped out of sight in late April, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that he had a cold. It soon abandoned that explanation, but it never offered a new one other than to say that he was recovering from an unspecified illness. Well-connected Chinese and foreign diplomats in Beijing believe that he suffered a heart attack.

During Li’s absence, President Jiang Zemin and Vice Premier Zhu Rongji both assumed more prominent roles in governmental affairs, prompting widespread speculation that Li would be politically damaged by his poor health.

It remains to be seen whether his reappearance means that he can fully resume the powers of his office. He could still have medical problems that would limit the role he can play, and he also may have been politically weakened by his absence.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Wu Jianmin said Monday morning that Li is “gradually resuming all his duties as premier.”

China’s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, 88, is increasingly frail. Jiang, Li and Zhu are all key players in the gradually unfolding contest for power in the post-Deng era.

Li is one of the most hard-line members of the successor generation of Chinese leaders. He used his reappearance Monday to emphasize a familiar theme: that countries should not lecture each other on human rights issues.

Li emphasized China’s stance that food, shelter, economic development and national sovereignty are more important than political liberties.

“For a developing nation,” Li told Mahathir, according to the New China News Agency, “human rights are in the first place the rights to independence, existence and development.”