Li Peng, who has died aged 90, was one of the most influential politicians in China during the first two decades of the “reform and opening up” process begun under Deng Xiaoping in 1978. He had perfect revolutionary credentials, and roots within the Communist party, but will be remembered most for his role in the events of 1989, which saw the suppression of student demonstrators by the armed forces in which hundreds if not thousands died.

As premier and head of government, Li Peng ordered the pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in May of that year to return to their campuses. After this failed, he declared martial law on 20 May, and issued the order for crack troops from the People’s Liberation Army to move in on the demonstration in the early hours of 4 June.

The pictures of tanks and soldiers training their guns on the youth of modern China were shown across the world and Li Peng was the most visible leader associated with the crackdown. The image that will be irrevocably associated with this was his meeting with student leaders before 20 May, when he sat, in the Great Hall of the People, in green military fatigues, growing visibly irritated and impatient with the young, rebellious group leaders ranged around him.

Yet secret papers purportedly recording the top-level discussions in the weeks and days before the event, which were subsequently released, show that Li Peng was little more than a willing executioner: the real orders had come from the group of senior leaders who had ostensibly retired long before. The paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, had been the most instrumental, and without his support it is unlikely the PLA would have moved in.

But Li Peng was to be reviled from that point on and was called “the Butcher of Beijing”. His visits abroad, particularly to the west, were to be met with hostility, even though he was to continue as premier till 1998, and then to serve as the head of the Chinese parliament and lawmaking group, the National People’s Congress, from 1998 to 2003.

He attempted to clear his name in 2004, with an essay published on the 100th anniversary of Deng’s birth, and also wrote a memoir, The Key Moment, which he was apparently denied permission to release by the government he had served so long.

Li was born in Sichuan province, in the south-west of China. His father, Li Shuoxun, was an early Communist party martyr, shot by the nationalist Kuomintang army when Li was three. He was adopted by Zhou Enlai, who was to go on to be one of the great heroes of China’s struggle against both the Japanese in the 1930s and 40s and the nationalists in the civil war from 1945 to 1949; and of the construction of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 onwards. The relationship with Zhou was to be critical in Li’s career, although he did not come to prominence till almost a decade after Zhou’s death.

Li Peng followed almost the classic route for Chinese communist leaders who belonged to what has been called the “second and third generation leadership” – those who immediately succeeded Mao Zedong. He was a technocrat, educated from 1948 to 1955 at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in Russia before returning to China to occupy a number of positions in the power and engineering sector throughout the late 50s and 60s.

Li Peng, with his wife, Zhu Lin, meeting President Boris Yeltsin and his wife, Naina, at the start of international talks in Moscow in 1998. Photograph: AP

He was to keep a lower profile during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 onwards, a period that saw many senior party leaders and intellectuals persecuted and imprisoned. He spent his time in Liaoning, in the north-east of China, before returning to Beijing to work in the power supply bureau of the revolutionary committee there. His first important move up the government system came in 1979, just after the reform process started, when he was made power industry minister, and vice-minister of water resources.

None of these titles were to prepare him for the role he would take, over the next few years, as one of the “hardliners” opposed to the over-openness of the Chinese economy in the mid to late 80s, and who urged a greater closeness to what they interpreted as the spirit of the Communist party, and state control of politics and the economy. Li Peng’s move into the upper echelon of Chinese politics was to coincide with this debate, built around the figures of the then party secretary Hu Yaobang, and then, after Hu’s fall in 1987, his replacement, Zhao Ziyang; Li took Zhao’s place in turn as premier.

Both were to wrestle with the paradox of an expanding economy, which was fundamentally changing China, and a political system that remained resistant to change. Party thinkers in the mid-80s seriously considered the option of introducing democratic reforms modelled on the northern European countries.

But increases in inflation, corruption, and dissent and confusion within the party meant that, by 1989, Chinese society had become divided and unstable, and what political will there had been to try out these reforms had gone.

Contemporary commentators may have been unfair on Li Peng. While he was no liberal, in fact he was a supporter of the economic reforms, and of party reforms, though not at the pace demanded by some of the more radical in China. He was instrumental in moves to keep China’s bid for entry to the World Trade Organisation on track, and had great influence over China’s continuing economic reforms, without which its current successes would not have been possible.

Li Peng meets Helmut Kohl

One other feature of his life that typifies Chinese elite politicians of his generation was the criticism of the wealth and influence accrued by his family members. Li’s wife, Zhu Lin, was a senior official in the state power sector and his daughter, Li Xiaolin, it was later revealed in the Panama Papers, held offshore companies. But when Xi Jinping began an extensive anti-corruption drive after taking power in 2013, Li’s family did not figure among the main targets. In 2016 his son Li Xiaopeng was appointed transport minister, continuing the family political tradition.

A controversial legacy was the Three Gorges Dam project, which Li Peng supported, and pushed through in 1992 despite considerable popular opposition in China. This, more than anything else, with its complex mixture of success and failure, and residue of anger and disappointment, remains the most fitting monument to his career.

He is survived by Zhu Lin, and his children, Li Xiaolin, Li Xiaopeng, and another son, Li Xiaoyong.

• Li Peng, politician, born 20 October 1928; died 22 July 2019