[14]) His grandfather Li Chaobin (李朝斌) was a general in the Xiang Army under the leadership of Zeng Guofan.

[18][19] On Li's role in Chinese culture, Yu Ying-shih of Princeton University wrote, "Through (his) books he emancipated a whole generation of young Chinese intellectuals from Communist ideology"[10] Li himself writes that "our younger generation longs to make a contribution to the fields of philosophy and that they are searching [for new avenues] to meet the nation's general goal of modernization as well as the challenge to answer the question about what direction the world is heading.

"[20] As a result of his criticism of the Chinese government's response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, he was confined to house arrest for three years.

Following substantial U.S. official and academic pressure, the Chinese government granted Li permission to visit the United States in 1991.

[21] An overriding goal of Li's work has been to promote a philosophy of the human being that was not only based on the materialistic and historical realities as analyzed and posited by Karl Marx, but which also supported the view of Immanuel Kant as to the individual's intellectual, moral and aesthetic capacities.

[citation needed] Li's analysis of Marxist philosophy and political theory developed the following philosophical concepts:[citation needed] The "Practical Philosophy of Subjectivity" is the study of the human being on two levels, each level with its own internal additional two sub-levels of content: 1) that of humankind, with both a techno-social structure and a "cultural-psychological" formation; and, 2) that of the individual, at once a member of a society, a social class, an ethnicity, etc., and at the same time a distinct body and mind.

To elaborate, the use of tools is not an instinctive biological activity, but rather one "attained and consolidated through a long period of posteriori learning from experience".

Coupled with primitive language, motor thinking ultimately results in the creation of a "vague, common consciousness of being a community" which develops into the "symbolic tools of shamanic rites and ceremonies resulting in the establishment of primitive human society… fundamentally different from that of the animals".

Li stated that Western Learning encompasses technology as well as conceptual systems and philosophies including Marxism and is the pluralistic and diverse technosocial basis of modern-day China's reality.

[25] In "Dual Variation of Enlightenment and Nationalism", Li Zehou argues that all modern concepts such as freedom, independence human rights, which were discarded after 1919, and all Chinese traditions should be analyzed and investigated.

He wrote that following a relatively long period of peace, developing prosperity and modernization, China would benefit from an examination of the West's "centuries of experience in political-legal theory and practice such as the separations of the three powers".