Yu Guangyuan (; born as 郁鐘正; pinyin: Yù Zhōngzhèng; 5 July 1915 – 23 September 2013) was a Chinese economist, philosopher, and a senior official of the People's Republic of China. Yu was recognized as one of the first proponents of the reform and opening up in China and the theory of "the Primary Stage of Socialism". He was a close adviser of and speech-writer for the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.
Yu was a senior member of the Political Research Office of the State Council, a deputy president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a deputy director of the State Science and Technology Commission of the State Council.
Early life Yu Guangyuan was born on 5 July 1915 in Shanghai, three years after the founding of the Republic of China. The Yu () family, with kinship ties to powerful government 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 converted the Yu Family's 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 his arms. Yu's father, trained in chemical engineering, 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, where he studied theoretical physics under the 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 nuclear physicists Qian Sanqiang (Tsien San-Tsiang) and He Zehui (Ho Zah-wei), as well as the optical physicist and "father of Chinese optical engineering" Wang Daheng. Yu graduated from Tsinghua in 1936. Yu and his classmate Qian Sanqiang both applied for a position at Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie's laboratory. However, when Yu was drawn to the December 9th Movement, he and Qian agreed that Qian should pursue a career in scientific research, whereas Yu should join the revolution. He emerged as a prominent student leader in the December 9th movement (1935) and organized the National Liberation Pioneers (Minxian: 民先) to broaden the anti-Japanese alliance. On the eve of Japanese invasion of China in 1937, Yu joined the Chinese Communist Party. Upon this occasion, he dropped the original family name (郁) and adopted his later name Yu Guangyuan (于光遠). His unfinished thesis on general relativity was later completed by his fellow student, Tsinghua physicist Peng Huanwu in 1997.
World War II 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 organisation emerged in the aftermath of the December 9th Movement. Many of its early advocates and participants went on to become revolutionary leaders and public officials of the People's Republic of China, including Huang Jing, Yao Yilin, Xiong Xianghui, and Xu Jiatun. The league underwent a period of transition under their leadership, which laid the foundation of the Youth League of the Communist Party.
Yu Guangyuan, along with Ai Siqi and Zhang Hanfu (章漢夫), organised the "Society for Natural Philosophy" (自然哲學研究會). Yu later taught physics at Lingnan University (嶺南大學) in Guangzhou, an institution which later split into the Lingnan University in Hong Kong and the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong. During this time, he remained a leader of Minxian. In February 1937, Yu returned to Beijing, and led the Minxian movement in its headquarter.
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Yu organised students movements in Kuomintang-controlled areas in Baoding, Shijiazhuang, Taiyuan, Wuhan, western Hebei, Changsha, Nanchang, and northern Guangdong. He was appointed the Secretary for Youth Work in the early Chinese Communist Party's Yangtse River Bureau (長江局), which later morphed into the Southern Bureau (南方局).
In 1939, Yu was summoned to Yan'an. He translated Engels's Dialectics of Nature (Dialektik der Natur) from German to Chinese while riding a donkey to Yan'an. On his way, he ran into a group of marching Japanese tanks, where he narrowly survived and escaped. In Yan'an, Yu preoccupied himself with the economics of agriculture. A trained physicist, Yu took extensive field trips to Mizhi and Suide counties, and published a book on land and agriculture in northern Shaanxi (republished in 1979). He was for a while the Director of the Yan'an Library (), and was involved in the founding and teaching of the renowned Counter-Japanese Military and Political University (). Along with Chen Boda and Tian Jiaying, Yu also tutored Mao Zedong's son, Mao Anying in Chinese history and classical Chinese literature.
In the early 1940s, Yu organised the "Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region Society for the Natural Sciences" (陝甘寧邊區自然科學研究會). In 1946, Yu was sent to found the Liberation (解放) newspaper. After the Chongqing Negotiations failed to reunite China peacefully, Yu returned to Yan'an and became the deputy-editor-in-chief of the "Opinions" (言論) section of the Liberation Daily (解放日報). Since March, 1947, Yu led the Land Reforms in the Jinsui (晉綏) regions, Hebei, and Shandong. In 1948, Yu Guangyuan, Mao Anying, Wu Jianxun (吳劍迅), Shi Jingtang (史敬棠) led the historic Zhangjiaji Land Reform (張家集土改) in the Bohai area of Shandong.
Career in the People's Republic of China 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 () 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.
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 (predecessor of Central Policy 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 (), 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.
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. Yu was a "major author of the whole concept" of Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Yu was a key ally and personal friend of Hu Yaobang.
Active in economic policy, Yu contributed to Deng's plan to develop Shenzhen as a special economic zone. He proposed to loosen and facilitate borders control between Hong Kong and Shenzhen to boost economic activity and foreign trade in 1978. The next year, he worked with the libera-minded Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping, on the development of Shekou. In the early 1980s, he worked with his personal friend and close ally Ren Zhongyi, then First Secretary of Guangdong, to launch market reforms in the economy of Guangdong. In the 1980s-90s, he turned similar attention to Hainan, envisioning as a future economic hub in the island-province.
Yu played a prominent role in opposing the Qigong fever and related superstitions during the 1980s and 1990s. He opposed groups like Falun Gong for their extraordinary claims and labelled them as unscientific pseudoscience. In a July 1981 speech, he stated: "we should stop any ESP-related antiscience propaganda". By the late 1990s, his position had emerged victorious resulting in a state crackdown on Falun Gong.
Legacies Foundations of political economy 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.
"Look Forward" v. "Look to Money" In the making of Chinese economic policies in the 1980s, Yu advocated for adding to the slogan "Look Forward" () that of "Look to Money" (), 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.
Environmental thought