Former Chinese premier Li Peng – known as the "Butcher of Beijing" for his role in the Tiananmen Square crackdown – has died at the age of 90, state media said Tuesday.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency said Li died Monday of an unspecified illness. His death was not announced until Tuesday evening.

Li, a keen political infighter, spent two decades at the pinnacle of power before retiring in 2002. He left behind a legacy of prolonged and broad-based economic growth coupled with authoritarian political controls.

While broadly disliked by the public, he oversaw China’s reemergence from post-Tiananmen isolation to rising global diplomatic and economic clout, a development he celebrated in often defiantly nationalistic public statements.

"Ridding themselves from the predicament of imperialist bullying, humiliation and oppression, the calamity-trodden Chinese people have since stood up," Li said in 1995 in a speech for the Oct. 1 anniversary of the 1949 revolution that brought the ruling Communist Party to power.

One reminder of Li will likely stand for ages to come: During his final years in power, he pushed through approval for his pet project – the gargantuan $22 billion Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which forced 1.3 million people to leave homes that were swallowed up by its enormous reservoir.

Li, who became acting premier in November 1987, triumphed over pro-reform party leader Zhao Ziyang in 1989 after the fellow native of Sichuan province was toppled from power for sympathizing with the student protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

"The situation will not develop as you wish and expect," an angry Li told student leaders in a confrontational meeting on May 18, 1989.

The next night, Li, flushed with anger, went on national television to announce martial law in Beijing.

"The anarchic state is going from bad to worse," he said. "We are forced to take resolute and decisive measures to put an end to the turmoil."

On the night of June 3-4, troops invaded the city, killing hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Beijing residents on their way to ending the student occupation of Tiananmen Square.

China acknowledged Li’s role, but in a positive way, in a lengthy eulogy read Tuesday night by a newscaster on state broadcaster CCTV.

Li joined the majority of the leadership in taking "resolute measures to prevent turmoil, quell the counter-revolutionary riots and stabilize the domestic situation," the eulogy read in part. "He played an important role in the great struggle that concerns the future and destiny of the party and the nation."

Li stepped down as premier in 1998, becoming chairman of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. He retired from the party’s seven-member ruling Standing Committee in 2002 as part of a long-planned handover of power to a younger generation of leaders headed by Hu Jintao.

In his later years, Li rarely appeared in public, and was usually seen only at official gatherings aimed at displaying unity, such as the 80th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army in 2007.

As his profile waned, he reportedly began lobbying older colleagues to support his children’s political ambitions. One of his two sons, Li Xiaopeng, was the governor of Shanxi province before becoming transport minister in 2016.

Li returned to the headlines in 2010 when a Hong Kong publisher announced he had Li’s purported memoir on the Tiananmen Square crackdown. The publisher later halted the book’s release, claiming copyright problems, but supposed excerpts of the diaries were leaked online.