During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Li commanded military actions against the Japanese invasion in the northwest of China, including Inner Mongolia and Shanxi.

As in other areas of the Southwest, public security was a major early concern and Mao Zedong praised and rewarded leaders who forcefully approached "anti-bandit" activity and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries.

While Mao had explicitly exempted Tibet from this campaign, he had also left many decisions to local officials and warned them that those who were not able to carry out the cooperatives would simply be replaced.

Li made a concession to the Tibetan delegates by building them new homes in Chengdu, but they were essentially under house arrest and unable to push back against the policy.

[8] Other cadre like Fan Ming had little patience for Tibetan delays, and saw monks and monasteries as particular sources of resistance which would ultimately need to be crushed.

As described by the anthropologist and historian Melvyn Goldstein, Li overrode the concerns of the United Front Work Department and the PRC's State Ethnic Affairs Commission who had argued against his proposal for a trial period of land reform in Ganzi, a Tibetan area of western Sichuan, in 1956.

These steps angered local Tibetans and in February 1956, a number of uncoordinated attacks began against Chinese officials and soldiers, reaching most of Ganzi's eighteen counties.

[8] Li Jingquan originally responded to the crisis by advocating pulling back all troops, but then sent in two thousand Chinese soldiers into Litang to crush the uprising.

[8] On 21 April 1951, as provincial governor Li Jingquan ordered the execution of 6,000 'landlords' in the ethnic region of western Sichuan to kickstart the land reform campaign.

[11] However, he chose to emphasize that other reasons such as hookworm might be responsible for deaths, downplayed major problems in the pork supplies in Sichuan, and pushed forward with overreporting grain totals even at the times when Mao himself had instructed the Party not to inflate the numbers.

[12]: 85  It in turn created an administrative group to handle development in Panzhihua and another to manage the construction of conventional weapons industries around Chongqing.