Li Keqiang, who spent a decade as China¡¯s premier and in President Xi Jinping¡¯s shadow, died of a heart attack in Shanghai on Friday, at the age of 68.

It was a sad end for a politician whose career was cut short by a Communist Party power play.

He is best known outside of China for the Li Keqiang Index, created by The Economist to measure the nation¡¯s economic growth. Finding the official gross domestic product number unreliable, Li, a policy wonk, preferred to use high-frequency indicators, such as railway freight traffic, electricity consumption and bank loans, to figure out how well the economy is going.