Chen Yun (13 June 1905 – 10 April 1995) was a statesman of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China. He was one of the most prominent leaders during the periods when China was governed by Mao Zedong and later by Deng Xiaoping. In the 1980s, Chen was considered the second most powerful figure in China, ranking only behind Deng Xiaoping. Chen Yun was also known as Liao Chenyun (), as he took his uncle's (Liao Wenguang; ) family name when he was adopted by him after his parents died.
A major Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political figure before the establishment of the PRC, Chen first joined the CCP Central Committee in 1931, and the Politburo in 1934. He became the head of the CCP's Organization Department in 1937, and became one of CCP leader Mao Zedong's close advisors. He played an important role in the Yan'an Rectification Movement of 1942, and started becoming responsible for economic affairs that year, ultimately heading the Central Finance and Economic Commission from 1949.
After the establishment of the PRC, Chen was a key figure in moderating many of Mao's radical economic ideas and participated in the drafting of the First five-year plan. Chen was instrumental in China's economic reconstruction following the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–1960) along with Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai, advocating for a "bird cage" economy in which the market economy should be allowed to play a role but kept contained like a "bird in a cage". Chen was demoted during the Cultural Revolution though he returned to power after Mao's death in 1976.
After Deng Xiaoping's rehabilitation, Chen voiced his criticism of Maoist policies, decrying China's lack of economic policies, and later became one of the architects of Deng's reform and opening up policy. During the 1980s and the 1990s, Chen was regarded as the second-most powerful person in China after Deng and was later recognized as one of the Eight Elders of the Chinese Communist Party. Initially a strong advocate for the reform and opening up, Chen increasingly became conservative towards the reforms as they progressed, becoming a key figure in slowing many reforms and becoming the leader of CCP's conservative factions. Chen resigned from the Central Committee in 1987 though keeping his influence as the chairman of the Central Advisory Commission until 1992, when he fully retired from politics.
Early life Chen was born in Qingpu, Jiangsu (now part of Shanghai) in 1905. Chen was a typesetter for the famous Commercial Press of Shanghai, which printed revolutionary books and even Protestant Bibles. He played a prominent role as a younger organizer in the labor movement during the early and mid-1920s. Chen joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1925. Following the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, Chen was an important organizer under Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. For a time, Zhou and Yun resided at a Church of Christ in Changting which was the site of a revolutionary committee. After Chiang Kai-shek turned against the CCP in 1927, Chen fled to his hometown, but soon returned to Shanghai and secretly continued his work as a labor unionist.
Chen was one of the few Communist Party organizers from an urban working-class background; he worked underground as a union organizer in the late 1920s, participated in the Long March, and served on the Central Committee from 1931 to 1987.*Free searchable biography of Chen Yun at China Vitae He became a member of the Politburo Standing Committee in 1933. He was active throughout his career in the field of economics, despite receiving no formal education after elementary school.
Early Communist Party career He served on the Central Committee in the Third Plenary Session of 6th Central Committee of CCP in 1930 and became a member of the Politburo in 1934. In 1933 he evacuated to Ruijin, in Jiangxi province, the headquarters of the CCP's main "soviet" area. He was in overall charge of the Party's "white areas" work, that is, underground activities in places not under Party control. On the Long March he was one of the four Standing Committee members of the Political Bureau who attended the January 1935 Zunyi Conference. He left the Long March sometime in the spring of 1935, returning to Shanghai, and in September 1935 he went to Moscow, serving as one of the CCP's representatives to the Comintern sent by the Fifth Plenum Politburo, although he did not take part in the work of the delegation because he was sent to the Stalingrad Tractor Factory as a punishment for his participation in the Luo Zhanglong faction.Gao Hua, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. 2018
In 1937 Chen returned to China as an adviser to the Xinjiang leader Sheng Shicai. Chen later joined Mao in Yan'an, probably before the end of 1937. In November 1937 he became director of the Party's Organization Department, serving in that capacity until 1944, and by the early 1940s was in the inner circle of Mao's advisers. His writings on organization, ideology, and cadre training were included in the important study materials for the Yan'an Rectification Movement of 1942, a campaign of political persecutions which consolidated Mao's power within the Party. During this time, it is known that he protected some comrades accused of being Trotskyites, and criticized the exaggerations of the campaign in the Shandong base area.
Chen's economic career began in 1942, when he was replaced by Ren Bishi as head of the CCP Organization Department. In his new position, Chen was assigned responsibility for the financial management of Northwest China. Two years later, he was identified as responsible for finance in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region as well. He added Northeast China to his portfolio in 1946 (then under the overall leadership of General Lin Biao and Political Commissar Peng Zhen).
During the middle of the 1940s, Chen was a major contributor to the party's strategy of "economic warfare." Under this concept, reviving the economy in liberated areas was a major contribution to the revolutionary struggle. Chen argued that economic development and production were critical, explaining that "[o]nly if we can solve the problem of food and clothing for the masses can we become leaders of the masses. Thus, a revolutionary businessman is an outright revolutionary."
A main challenge for the Communists during this period was driving out the Nationalist's competing currency and replacing it with the currencies used in the revolutionary base areas. Chen argued that the approach should rely on both economic and political mechanisms (as opposed to prohibition), including regulating the value of competing currencies and controlling trade in key commodities. Another Chen Yun's contribution to the early development of the Chinese economy was his stabilization of prices in Shanghai after the Nationalist government failed to curb the financial crisis caused by speculations of corporate monopolies.
Political career under Mao In May 1949, Chen Yun was named head of the new national Central Finance and Economic Commission. In July 1948, he was appointed to lead the newly established Northeastern Financial and Economic Commission. The Northeast Administrative Commission formed the Northeastern Economic Planning Committee (the primary bureaucratic body responsible for economic planning in Manchuria region), with Chen as the committee's head.
In early 1952, Zhou Enlai led a team to draft the first Five-Year Plan which included Chen, Bo Yibo, Li Fuchun and General Nie Rongzhen. Zhou, Chen and Li presented the draft to Soviet experts in Moscow, who rejected it. In early 1953, Gao Gang and the State Planning Commission began work on what would eventually become the final version. After Gao's political downfall, Chen Yun, Bo Yibo, Li Fuchuan and (later) Li Xiannian would manage the Chinese economy for more than 30 years. Chen would be appointed as Vice Premier of China in 1954.
In July 1958, Chen, Nie Rongzhen, and Bo Yibo were assigned to a "three persons" group to oversee China's nuclear weapons development program.
Economic management
In the 1950s, Chen was the CCP's leading economic planner.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Chen was a proponent of more market-oriented economic measures. Looking back, Chen would later believe that it was Mao's errors that most kept China from achieving its Five-Year Plans. In 1956, when the 8th National Congress of Chinese Communist Party was held, Chen was elected as vice chairman of the Central Committee.Editors, China Directory, 1979 Edition, Radiopress, Inc (Tokyo), September 1978, p. 481 Around that time, both Mao and Chen had come to believe that the economic system, modeled on that of the Soviet Union, was overly centralized, but had different ideas about what to do about it. Chen believed that markets should have a larger economic role but remain subject to a state-controlled plan. Chen used the metaphor of a caged bird to describe the socialist economy. If the cage was too small, the bird would not survive. If the cage was left open, the bird would fly away.
In June 1958, Mao changed the party and government structure by establishing groups in charge of finance, legal matters, foreign affairs, science, and culture and education which bypassed the State Council. Chen was made the head of the finance group.
Mao sought to devolve powers to provincial and local authorities, which were in practice Party committees rather than state technocrats, and to use mass mobilization rather than either a detailed central planning or the market to promote economic growth, leading to Chen being sidelined within the party's economic apparatus. Mao's program prevailed, and these policies converged with Mao's disregard for supply-demand realities and unchecked, falsified yield data that led to the ultimately disastrous Great Leap Forward and a famine that killed millions. By early 1959, the economy was already showing signs of strain. In January of that year, Chen Yun published an article calling for increased Soviet aid. In March, he published a subdued but general critique of the Leap, especially its reliance on mass movement. Economic growth, he asserted, was not simply a matter of speed. It required attention to safe working conditions and quality engineering. It depended on technical skill, not just political awareness.
Chen began to fell out of favor with Mao. In the summer of 1959, the Party convened a meeting at the resort town of Lushan to review the policies of the Great Leap Forward. The Minister of Defense, Marshal Peng Dehuai, attacked the radicalism of the movement, and Mao took this, or affected to take it, as a personal attack on himself and his authority. Mao responded with a vicious personal attack on Peng. Peng lost his military positions and the Party undertook a general purge of what Mao termed right opportunism. Further reform of the Leap's policies were now out of the question. China continued on its set course for another year or more, and by the end of 1960 had fallen deep into famine.
Chen Yun was certainly in sympathy with Peng Dehuai's criticism of the Leap and joined forces with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to manage the economy in the post-Great Leap Forward period, which required deft handling of Chairman Mao's sensitivity to criticism.