Chen Yun

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Chen.

Chen Yun 陈云 陳雲
This content has an uncertain copyright status and is pending deletion. You can comment on its removal.
1st First Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China
In office 1954 – 1974
Premier	Zhou Enlai
Succeeded by	Lin Biao
1st Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection
In office September 1982 – October 1987
Premier	Li Peng
Succeeded by	Qiao Shi
Born	June 13, 1905 (1905-06-13) Qingpu, Shanghai
Died	April 10, 1995 (1995-04-11) Beijing
Political party	Communist Party of China
Spouse(s)	Yu Ruomu

Chen Yun (simplified Chinese: 陈云; traditional Chinese: 陳雲; pinyin: Chén Yún) (June 13, 1905 – April 10, 1995) was one of the most influential leaders of the People's Republic of China and one of the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party for almost its entire history. He is also known as Liao Chengyun (廖程雲); it's unclear whether this was his original name or a pseudonym he used during his underground work in Shanghai. He was one of the Big Five in Communist China along with Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De and considered to be one of the Eight Immortals of Communist Party of China^[1].

Chen was a Central Committee Alternate in 1930-31 (a much more prestigious position than today, due to their very small numbers), Director of the CC Organization Department in 1938, and attended the 7th Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1935. He was elevated to the Central Committee and its Politburo in 1940, and remained on the Politburo until August 1966. He was elected party Vice Chairman in 1956, but was only an ordinary Central Committee member under the 9th CC (1969). Chen was reinstated to his Vice Chairmanship in January 1975. ^[2]

Biography

Early life

A native of Qingpu (now part of Shanghai), Chen was one of the few Communist Party organizers from a 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^[1]. He was also active in the field of economics, despite receiving no formal education after elementary school.

Political life

As a typesetter for the famous Commercial Press of Shanghai, Chen played a prominent role as a younger organizer in the labor movement during the early and mid 1920s, joining the CCP in 1924. Following the May 30 Movement of 1925, Chen was an important organizer under Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. After Chiang Kai-shek turned against the CCP in 1927 he fled to his home town, but soon thereafter returned to Shanghai, working underground. He served on the Central Committee in the Third Plenary Session of Sixth Central Committee of CPC 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 of that year he went to Moscow, serving as one of the CCP's representatives to the Comintern. In 1937 returned to China as an adviser to the Xinjiang leader Sheng Shicai. Chen 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 key Zheng Feng, or rectification, campaigns of 1942 which consolidated Mao's power.

Chen’s economic career began in 1942 when he was replaced by Ren Bishi as head of the CCP CC Organization Department and assigned responsibility for 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 (under the overall leadership of General (later Marshal) Lin Biao and Political Commissar Peng Zhen.

In May 1949, Chen Yun was named head of the new national Central Finance and Economic Commission. In early 1952, Zhou Enlai led a team to draft the first Five-Year Plan which included Chen, Bo Yibo, Li Fuchun and General (later Marshal) 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.^[3] After Gao's fall, Chen, Bo Yibo, Li Fuchuan and (later) Li Xiannian would manage the Chinese economy for the next 30+ years.

In 1956, when the 8th National Congress of Communist Party of China was held, Chen was elected a Vice-chairman of the Central Committee. 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’s proposal was to make wider use of the market, allowing for the operation of supply and demand rather than simple government fiat in determining the allocation of resources. He argued that decisions concerning prices and production should be made by individual firms, in conformity with business logic. At the same time he favored giving the central government ministries stronger control over these firms, to assure that their decisions did not transgress the boundaries of the plan.

Mao’s idea, rather, was to devolve powers to provincial and local authorities, in practice Party committees rather than state technocrats, and to use mass mobilization rather than either a detailed central plan or the market to promote economic growth. Mao's program prevailed, and these policies converged with the rest of the ultimately disastrous Great Leap Forward. 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, perhaps a signal to Moscow that the wild men were no longer in control of the economy. In March he published a subdued but general critique of the Leap, especially its reliance on the mass movement. Economic growth, he asserted, is not simply a matter of speed. It requires attention to safe working conditions and quality engineering. It depends on technical skill, not just political awareness.

This was Chen’s last public statement during Mao’s lifetime. In the summer of 1959 the Party convened a meeting at the resort town of Lushan to review the policies of the Leap. The Minister of Defense, Marshal Peng Dehuai, attacked the radicalism of the Leap, and Mao took this, or affected to take it, as an 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 “right opportunism.” Further reform of the Leap policies was 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, but he was not included among the right opportunists. Chen 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 criticizm.^[4]

Although Chen nominally retained his positions as Party vice chairman and member of the Politburo, he was no longer in practice part of the core Party leadership. He did, however, continue to express his opinions behind the scenes. In 1961 he conducted investigations of the rural areas around Shanghai. According to a Cultural Revolution attack on him by the radical group within the finance system, he reported the peasants as saying: “In the days of Chiang Kai-shek we had rice to eat. In the glorious era of Chairman Mao, we have only gruel.” According to his obituary, Chen was one of the main designers of the economic policies of the 1961-1962 “capitalist road” era, when the economic line stress material incentives and sought to encourage economic growth even at the expense of ideological visions. His only “public” appearance during this time was a photograph of him published on the front page of the People’s Daily and other major newspapers on May 1, 1962, showing a somewhat emaciated Chen shaking hands with Chairman Mao, while Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Deng Xiaoping—the entire inner core of leadership of that time, with the exception of Lin Biao—look on. There was no caption or any other explanation.

During the Cultural Revolution Chen Yun was denounced in Red Guard publications but not in the official press. He was re-elected to the Central Committee in the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 but not to the Politburo. He no longer held any functional positions. Later that year he was “evacuated” from Beijing, as were many other inactive or disgraced first-generation leaders, as part of a supposed plan preparing against the eventuality of an invasion by the Soviet Union. Chen was put to work in a factory in Nanchang in Jiangxi province, where he stayed for three years. In January, 1975, he was elected to the Standing Committee of China's legislature, the National People’s Congress.

Role in the Post-Mao government

Following the death of Mao in September 1976 and the coup d'etat against the radical Gang of Four a month later, Chen became increasingly active in the country’s political life. He and General Wang Zhen petitioned party chairman Hua Guofeng to rehabilitate Deng Xiaoping at the March 1977 CCP CC Work Conference, but were turned down.^[5] After Deng was rehabilitated later that year, Chen led the attack on the Maoist era at the November-December 1978 CCP CC Work Conference, raising the sensitive “six issues” – the purges of Bo Yibo, Tao Zhu, Wang Heshou and Peng Dehuai; the 1976 Tiananmen Incident; and Kang Sheng’s errors – aimed at undermining Hua and his leftist supporters.^[6] Chen’s intervention tipped the balance in favor of movement toward an open repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping’s promotion, in December 1978, to de facto head of the regime. Chen laid the basis for Deng’s “reform and opening” program.

In July 1979, Chen Yun was named head (and Li Xiannian deputy head) of the new national Economic and Financial Commission staffed with his own allies and conservative economic planners. In April and July of that year he made further provocative statements in internal Party meetings, although their authenticity was denied (in an equivocal manner) by official spokesmen. In these Chen deplored China’s lack of economic progress and the people’s loss of confidence in the Party. In April he criticized the luxurious life of Party leaders (including himself), and said if he had known in the period before Liberation what the past ten-some years would be like (that is, the Cultural Revolution period), he would have defected to Chiang Kai-shek. He deplored Mao’s dictatorial ways and implied, although not very strongly, that the Party should take a milder line against dissidents. If “Lin Biao and the Gang of Four”—that is, the radical leftists—had been able to assure the people food and clothing, he said, they would not have been so easy to overthrow.

In July he developed these themes in the course of another rambling exposition (which also included some sarcastic observations on the late Chairman’s taste in literature). Chen said: We say the old dynasties and the KMT “ruled” the country, but talk instead of the “leadership” of the Communist party. But the Party is in fact a ruling party, and if it wishes to keep its position it must also keep the support of the people. It should not float above the masses but should live among them as their servants. Both the welfare of the people and the Party’s ruling position require that the Party shrink the distance between itself and the people. The old dynasties, Chen said, knew the value of a “policy of yielding,” of retreating from untenable positions. The Party has to be able to step back from its past practices: in economy, culture, education, science, ideology. Without compromising the basic principle of socialism the Party must accommodate, for the time being, co-existence with aspects of capitalism. But all of this, Chen added, must be done carefully—otherwise China is in danger of abandoning socialism and restoring capitalism. These pronouncements presaged the major reorientation of Chinese communism in the reform movement.

Deng Xiaoping, of course, is credited as the “architect” of the Chinese reform, but the ideas behind the reform had been formulated by Chen Yun and Chen was more directly involved in the details of its planning and construction. A key feature of the reform was to use the market to allocate resources, within the scope of an overall plan. The reforms of the early 1980s were, in effect, the implementation, finally, of the program Chen had outlined in the mid-1950s. Chen called this the "birdcage economy" ^[7]. The cage is the plan, and it may be large or small. But within the cage the bird (the economy) is free to fly as he wishes.

In 1981, a rival Financial and Economic Leading Group was established under Zhao Ziyang and staffed by a more balanced mix of economic planners. In 1982 Chen Yun, 77 years of age, resigned from the Politburo and Central Committee and from his active administration positions. He served as Chairman of the new Central Advisors Commission, a temporary institution set up to provide a place for the surviving leadership of the founding generation, to give them a graceful way to step aside in favor of younger minds while also remaining at least marginally involved in public affairs.

During the 1980s Chen did in fact remain very much involved in policy discussions. He was increasingly disenchanted with the direction the reforms were taking. In 1982 he was among those grumbling about “spiritual pollution” (an Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign was organised in late 1983), as the sense of freedom spread from economics into the social and cultural arenas and even threatened to encroach on the political. His philosophical rupture with Deng Xiaoping became permanent around 1984, when the regime began to apply the kind of market reforms that had been so successful in agriculture to the urban areas and the industrial sector. Chen was not in principle opposed to this. Under the administered economy prices had been more or less frozen for decades and no longer had much relationship to the relative value of resources, goods, or services. But Chen did object to the way in which the urban reforms were carried out. The immediate consequence of “price reform” was a sudden and massive inflation, unprecedented in the experience of the younger generation and particularly frightening to older folks who could still remember the rampant inflation in the last years of the Nationalist regime. The increasing circulation of money in the economy, together with a hybrid system in which those in official position or with official connections were particularly well-placed to take advantage of the new opportunities to make a profit, encouraged official corruption. The first response to inflation was to issue bonuses to workers in the state-owned enterprises, to help make up for the price increases. Chen Yun argued that if there were to be such bonuses, they should be gauged to increased productivity. But in practice they were universal throughout the state sector: the equivalent of simply printing more money. Peasants, however, were not eligible for bonuses (since they were not technically state employees). The agricultural sector, which had prospered in the first stage of the reform, was particularly hard-hit by inflation.

Chen’s idea had been that the market should supplement the plan. In the context of radical Maoism this made him seem like an as-it-were social democratic proponent of market socialism. It turned out, however, that Chen meant exactly what he had said. He was much less enthusiastic about the market than Deng Xiaoping and Deng’s younger colleagues. Although in his “secret” pronouncements of 1979 Chen had shown an unusual personal disdain for Mao, he also indicated he shared the late Chairman’s worries that China would abandon socialism and revert to capitalism.

During the 1980s Chen emerged as the main figure among the more hard-line opponents of reform. He supported the vicious campaign in the early 1980s against the “three kinds of people,” a general purge of all those who had been identified with the radical faction during the Cultural Revolution. He made common cause with the cultural conservatism of the ideological hardliners. During the reform era Chen refused to meet with foreigners. Neither did he ever visit the new Special Economic Zones—although, in a memorial tribute to Li Xiannian, an old colleague from the economic system (and, like Chen, one of the few real proletarians among the first generation of Party leaders), he said this did not mean he was necessarily opposed to everything about the SEZs. But while Chen was the moral leader of the conservative (or leftist—in those days in China the terms were used synonymously) opposition to Deng Xiaoping, he did not challenge Deng’s personal primacy as head of regime.

In 1989 Chen was among the eight “elders,” the retired leaders who, from behind the curtain, made the key decisions concerning the student democracy movement. There is no evidence that Chen indulged in diatribes against the students or actively advocated their violent repression. But he did agree that Deng’s client, Zhao Ziyang, should be replaced as the formal head of the Party, and he endorsed Li Xiannian’s nomination of Jiang Zemin as the new Party general secretary.

Chen Yun was known for his conservatism, especially in his last years, but the general Chinese population held mixed feeling about him. He was admired despite his political stands because he was known as the one of the extremely few top ranking officials who was not corrupt. For all his influence, Chen was almost always out of step with his times—ahead of his times until about 1980, behind them after about 1984. His criticism of the reforms, especially in their economic implementation, is reflected in the efforts by the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao regimes to use state power to provide boundaries to the operation of the market and to ameliorate the damage it does to those poorly placed to benefit from it. His notion of the CPC as a “ruling party” is central to the redefinition of the role of the Party in Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents. In 2005, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Chen's birth, the Party press published over the course of several weeks the proceedings of a symposium discussing his contributions to CPC history, theory and practice.

Although out of favor with the Mao regime and ultimately opposed to Deng’s line, Chen Yun was not a victim of public humiliation or abuse. One reason, especially in Mao’s time, was his lack of will or ability to challenge the top leadership (and one of Deng’s merits is that he did not subject his defeated critics to public abuse). Whatever the wisdom of his substantive positions, Chen consistently appeared to act on principle rather than for personal advantage—perhaps another reason he could keep his influence even while excluded from the inner circles of decision-making. He showed little of the ambition, opportunism, or freedom of scruple that serves so well those who rise to the top in politics, whether in China or abroad.

His son, Chen Yuan, is Governor of the China Development Bank.

See also

• Red Team (CCP) (上海赤衛隊)

References

• Nicholas R. Lardy and Kenneth Lieberthal, eds., Chen Yün's Strategy for China's Development: A Non-Maoist Alternative (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1983).
• Donald W. Klein & Anne B. Clark, Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism, (Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press, 1971) Vol 1, pp. 149-153.
• Chen Yun zhuan, Biography of Chen Yun, Jin Chongji and Chen Qun, Beijing: Central Literature Publishing House, 2005, two volumes,
• Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 195-208.
• Ye Yonglie, 1978: Zhongguo Mingyun Da Zhuanzhe (Canton: Guangzhou Renmin Zhubanshe, 1997), pp. 255-260, 584-595.
• China News Analysis, 1182 (June 6, 1982)
• The Tiananmen Papers, compiled by Zhang Liang, edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), p. 308

External links

• Chen Yun, Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Page [1]

v • d • e First Vice Premiers of the People's Republic of China Chen Yun · Lin Biao · Deng Xiaoping · Wan Li · Yao Yilin · Zhu Rongji · Li Lanqing · Huang Ju · Wu Yi (acting) · Li Keqiang