This month China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang, will retire. He was once a rising star of the Communist Party and a contender to lead it, but under Xi Jinping he had little chance to shine. 

The Economist’s Beijing bureau chief, David Rennie, and senior China correspondent, Alice Su, ask what Mr Li’s career and retirement reveals about power in China. They speak to two people who know Mr Li: Tao Jingzhou, a former university classmate, and Joerg Wuttke, the head of the European Union chamber of commerce in China, about his political and economic outlook. And The Economist’s James Miles decodes the choice of Mr Li’s successor. 

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