Yu Guangyuan

Yu Guangyuan was born on 5 July 1915 in Shanghai, three years after the founding of the Republic of China. The renowned Yu (郁) family, with kinship ties to prominent officials, intellectuals and businessmen of the Qing Dynasty across China including the "red-topped hat" merchant Hu Xueyan, prospered from maritime trade and banking in the mid-19th century, reaching its zenith during the Daoguang reign. Reluctant association with the Small Swords Society in 1851, when the Rebels used the Yu courtyard and the Yu Garden as their two headquarters, led to blackmailing from the Qing government after the Xianfeng court quelled the rebellion, which further aggravated economic woes of the family. Since the Tongzhi period, the family's "sand-shipping" business steadily declined, under pressure from more advanced ships. Yu Guangyuan's maternal uncle is the late Qing and early Republican politician Cao Rulin, who is said to have predicted Yu's illustrious future while holding the infant in arms. Yu's father served briefly in the Republican government during Yuan Shikai's presidency.

Yu attended Shanghai Datong High School and Utopia University before enrolling at the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing,[2] where he studied theoretical physics under the renowned physicist Zhou Peiyuan, who showed Yu's dissertation to Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study for comments and corrections. His classmates at Tsinghua included Qian Sanqiang, He Zehui and Wang Daheng.[3][4] Yu graduated from Tsinghua in 1936, dropped his candidacy to a position at Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie's lab in favour of his classmate Qian Sanqiang, and chose a different path of career. He emerged as a prominent student leader in the December 9th movement (1935), organized the National Liberation Pioneers (Minxian: 民先) to broaden the anti-Japanese alliance, and joined the Chinese Communist Party shortly before the Japanese invasion. His unpublished paper on general relativity was finished in 1997 by his fellow student, Tsinghua physicist Peng Huanwu.

Yu became an early organizer, along with Li Chang, Qian Weichang and Qian Jiaju, of the Chinese National Liberation Vanguard (Minxian) upon the organization's founding in 1936. The league underwent a period of transition under their leadership, which laid the foundation of the Youth League of the Communist Party.

In Yan'an, Yu preoccupied himself with the economics of agriculture. He was for a while the Director of the Yan'an Library (延安圖書館), and was involved in the founding and teaching of the renowned Counter-Japanese Military and Political University (抗日軍政大學).

In 1954, Yu was elected Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1964, he served as the Executive Deputy Chair of the State Science and Technology Commission (国家科学技术委员会) under the directorship of Nie Rongzhen. The Commission has been succeeded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) since 1998.

During the Cultural Revolution, Yu was struggled against, deprived of his posts and rights to write and publish, and sent to the May 7th Cadre School in Ningxia. His memoirs of this era has proved a main primary source for historians.[5]

In 1975 Yu was assigned as a senior member of the Party Research Office of the State Council, and later of the Political Research Office, along with Hu Qiaomu, Wu Lengxi, Hu Sheng, Xiong Fu, Li Xin and Deng Liqun. He served concurrently as the Deputy President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Deputy Director of the State Science and Technology Commission of the State Council, and the Director of Economic Research at the State Planning Commission (國家計劃委員會), which has since evolved into the National Development and Reform Commission.

During the Third Plenary Session, Yu participated in the Northwestern Group along with other 34 attendees, including Xu Xiangqian and Hu Yaobang. Yu's criticism of the Two Whatevers camp of Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Chen Xilian and Ji Dengkui gained momentum in the conference, leading to the downfall of many Hua Guofeng allies in the aftermath of the conference.[6]

Yu worked closely with Deng Xiaoping before and during Deng’s periods of ascendancy, and drafted the reformist leader's landmark speech "Liberate Thought, Seek Truth from Facts, and Unite to Look Forward" at the Third Plenary Session.[7] Yu was a "major author of the whole concept" of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.[8]

Active in economic policy, Yu contributed to Deng's plan to develop Shenzhen as an economic zone. He proposed even to loosen and facilitate borders control between Hong Kong and Shenzhen to boost economic activity and foreign trade, as early as in 1978. The next year, he worked with the liberal-minded Xi Zhongxun on the development of Shekou.[9] In the 1980s, he turned similar attention to Hainan, envisioning as a future economic hub.

Known as "Encyclopedic" and a polymath, Yu is one of the most prolific authors of his time. In the 1960s, he authored and edited the "Political Economy Reader" with Su Xing and Gu Zhun, which served for decades as the standard economics textbook in China. The young Wu Jinglian was his research assistant in the writing project. Since the late 1970s, Yu proposed that commodity economy and market economy are compatible with socialism, a process of which China still remained on the initial stage. Supported by Deng Xiaoping, he was also one of the leading voices in a public debate over the measurement of truth in relation to politics. Yu also wrote extensively on the economics of education, games, leisure and entertainment.

In the making of Chinese economic policies in the 1980s, Yu advocated for adding to the slogan "Look Forward" (向前看) that of "Look to Money" (向钱看), the latter a homophonic pun on the former, both pronounced "Xiang Qian Kan." Once in the presence of an assembly of high-level officials and scholars gathered to criticise his economic thoughts, Yu affirmed that the pursuit of self-interest in the free market is central to the developing a successful commercial economy, that to focus on profit only and to denounce the pursuit of profit are equally undesirable, and that "it is by 'looking to money' that one could 'look ahead.'" This glaring rhetoric, for a long time subject to criticism from the more conservative Marxists, became the banner under which contemporary and later generations of economists make the case for reform.[10]

Yu was also a prolific author of memoirs that have become primary historical sources, such as his account of personal experiences in the Cultural Revolution. "You don't want to forget the past. To forget the past is to lose control over the future," he wrote in the forward to his 1995 work, The Cultural Revolution and Myself.[11] Also among them is the only available, comprehensive eyewitness account of the Third Plenum. Ezra Vogel says in the introductory remark of the English translation:

“…Thanks to Yu’s account, we now understand the nature of the Party Work Conference and the drama that took place there. Until Yu’s book appeared, it was possible for Western scholars to argue that the turning point in reform and opening was at the Third Plenum of December 1978. We now know that the key debates were held at the 34-day Party Work Conference … and that the Third Plenum which followed immediately was essentially ceremonial, officially approving the new consensus worked out at the Party Work Conference.”[12]

A long-time advocate for games, Yu helped founded the World Mahjong Organization (WMO) and was elected its first president in 2006. At the conference in the following year, it was decided that the World Mahjong Championship (WMC) is to be held every two years and that Chinese, English and Japanese are the official languages of the WMO.[13] Yu has been described as one of Mahjong's "most stalwart defenders." The game had been for a long time denigrated as decadent 'bourgeois culture' in mainland China, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Yu played an instrumental role in recovering its reputation since the country's market reforms. "It is the fault of people that they use mahjong to gamble," he says, "not the fault of the game."[14]

• Economic Writings of Yu Guangyuan (Volumes I-XXII) 2015
• Collected Works of Yu Guangyuan (Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy) 2013
• Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China's Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November–December 1978) (Voices of Asia), English Edition 2004
• On Institutional Reforms of the Chinese Economy 1985
• Political Economy (Capitalism) 1977-1978