Profile: Li Keqiang: A man who puts people first (8)

（Xinhua）  09:46, December 24, 2012

PEOPLE FIRST

Li's tenacity and decisiveness were shaped by his early days.

In March 1974, when China was being ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, 19-year-old Li was dispatched to Fengyang, a poverty-stricken county in east China's Anhui Province, to take up farming.

It was there he came to understand poverty and starvation.

He tilled the land during the day and read books at night. Admiring Li's spirit and his capacity to endure hardship, members of Dongling Brigade, Damiao Commune, chose him as Party chief.

"He was always the first to work, self-disciplined, down to earth and kind. As Party secretary, he never made people suffer, harmed no one and bullied no one," villagers recalled.

When the country resumed college entrance examination in 1977, Li took the exam and was accepted by the Law School of Peking University. Soon, he was elected chief of the university's Student Union. Upon graduation in 1982, he remained at Peking University to head its CYLC committee.

Three years later, the 30-year-old was chosen as a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CYLC, an organization of advanced young people under the leadership of the CPC.

While working with the CYLC Central Committee, Li devoted his spare time to studying the Chinese economy. His doctoral dissertation, "On the Tri-structure of China's Economy," won him the Sun Yefang Prize, the top honor for economic sciences on the Chinese mainland.