Ghosts of liberal past trail Party favorite Li

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - The Communist elite of China, the land of Mao Zedong, now has a likely top leader who as a student mixed with democracy advocates and learned the ideas of wigged English judges at a university that fostered dissent.

Li Keqiang, a 52-year-old who has been Party secretary of the northeastern province of Liaoning, was named on Monday as a member of the Communist Party's Standing Committee, the country's innermost circle of power.

His elevation will put him in contention to succeed Hu or government chief Premier Wen Jiabao five years hence.

Li's rise through the Communist Youth League, which also nurtured President Hu Jintao, and quick-march postings in big, tough provinces have marked him for higher things.

But Li's past as an intellectually voracious law student in an era of liberal ferment would mark a break with the staid engineers who have run China since the 1990s.

He was at the elite Peking University from the late 1970s, when cries for free speech and democracy sprouted in the disillusion left by Mao's Cultural Revolution.

He plunged into campus politics as reformist ideas galvanized students, befriended free thinkers who went on to notoriety as dissidents, struggled to master English, and co-translated "The Due Process of Law" by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist.

Li's past does not make him a harbinger of radical liberalization. Associates described him as a political chameleon who stayed carefully inside the system and paid his dues as a loyal functionary while classmates went abroad or into business.

But his background seems sure to fuel questions about whether the Communist Party can ensure future leaders stick to cautious political orthodoxy as they negotiate dramatic economic change.

"Being a university student is an age when a person's value framework is set," said Zhang Zuhua, a former Youth League official who closely observes politics.

"That period certainly had a huge impact on his outlook. The question is whether he is able to use it or has to struggle against it."

COMMUNE TO COURTROOM

Even before university, Li amassed rich political experience. Born in Anhui province in July 1955, his father was a local rural official, according to Zhang, the analyst.

Li worked on a rural commune in Fengyang County -- notoriously poor even for Mao's time and one of the first places to quietly revive private bonuses in farming in the late 1970s.

By the time he left the land, Li was a Communist Party member and secretary of his production brigade.