Yu Guangyuan
Yu Guangyuan 于光 | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | 26 September 2013 | (aged 98)
Alma mater | Tsinghua University |
Known for | Market economic reform in China, Marxism |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Economics, philosophy, physics |
Institutions | Chinese Academy of Social Sciences |
Notable students | Wu Jinglian, Chen Yuan, Yang Xiaokai |
Yu Guangyuan (Chinese: 于光
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
[edit]Yu Guangyuan was born on 5 July 1915 in Shanghai, three years after the founding of the Republic of China. The Yu (
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 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.[3][4] 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.[5] He emerged as a prominent student leader in the December 9th movement (1935) and organized the National Liberation Pioneers (Minxian:
World War II
[edit]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 nad 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 (
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 (
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).[7] He was for a while the Director of the Yan'an Library (
In the early 1940s, Yu organised the "Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region Society for the Natural Sciences" (陝甘
Career in the People's Republic of China after 1949
[edit]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 (
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.[10]
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 (
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.[11]
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.[12] Yu was a "major author of the whole concept" of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.[13] 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 an 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.[14] 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.
Legacies
[edit]Foundations of political economy
[edit]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"
[edit]In the making of Chinese economic policies in the 1980s, Yu advocated for adding to the slogan "Look Forward" (
Environmental thought
[edit]In 1996, Yu Guangyuan wrote a seminal text entitled “The Smallness of the Earth and the Largeness of the Earth,” in which he proposed the “grand exploitation of the earth along with its grand protection.” The “smallness” of the earth alluded to an environmental concern of its time: the earth was to be protected, on which the survival of humankind depends. By the “largeness of the earth,” Yu referred to the rich resources yet to be exploited, but that the success of their use “depends on our calculation and speculation on its profitability.” Over the decades of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, Yu developed this environmental rhetoric, binding production and ecology together by framing environmental protection as a form of productive labour. Fresh air and clean water have, in this sense, become products of labor, where quantitatively calculating the positive and negative effects of industry can inform future decisions in making better use of labour in damaged environments. Within this line of thinking, high levels of pollution can, for example, dictate the expulsion of heavy industries out of a city’s periphery, and millions of labourers can be organised to plant forests battling growing deserts. What such labour brings can be calculated to benefit the economy, whereby fixing these damages and industrial after-effects can further stimulate the movement of capital and labor. Yu’s vision had presented the earth as a holistic image while being an object of scientific construction. It was a logic of governance claiming that, if accurately calculated, the entirety of the planet can be exploited, and its negative effects reverse-engineered through further labour.
Yu's vision influenced the later Digital Belt and Road (DBAR) project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed in consultation with former US vice president, Al Gore. The project is also inspired by Gore’s 1998 speech in which he made a claim for a “‘Digital Earth’: a multi-resolution, three-dimensional virtual representation of the planet into which vast quantities of geo-referenced data can be embedded.” The idea is that contemporary problems surrounding the climate crisis can translate into issues of communication: communication of scientific knowledge around how the earth is changing; between “facts” and our understanding; and structurally, the communication between technical providers and decision makers, with the growing need for political offices being able to communicate with each other. “Digital Earth is another way to understand the world. Everything can be changed into data, to simulate precisely and to try and understand what the problems are that our society faces.”[16]
Political and economic reform
[edit]In 1997, prominent reformists in China, led by Yu Guangyuan, Ren Zhongyi, Gong Yuzhi, Li Rui, and Wu Xiang, voiced their strong commitment to both economic and political reforms, warned against the return of ultra-leftism in China, and envisioned a "Third Thought Liberation".[17]
Memoirs
[edit]Yu was 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 foreword to his 1995 work, The Cultural Revolution and Myself.[18] Also among them is the only available, comprehensive eyewitness account of the Third Plenum. Harvard Sociologist 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.”[19]
Miscellanies
[edit]A long-time advocate for games, economics of game, game theory, and leisure economics, 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.[20] 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."[21]
Publications
[edit]English
[edit]- Yu Guangyuan. Collected Works of Yu Guangyuan (Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy). London: Routledge, 2013
- Yu Guangyuan. Edited by Ezra F. Vogel and Steven I. Levin. Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China's Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November–December 1978) (Voices of Asia). Norwalk: EastBridge Books, 2004.
- Yu Guangyuan (editor). China's Socialist Modernization. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1984.
- Yu Guangyuan. Translated by Tang, Bowen; Zhao, Shuhan. On the Objective Character of Laws of Development--the Objective Laws of Development and the Human Will. Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 1982.
French
[edit]- Yu Guangyuan. Marxism et socialism I.M.L.M.Z, 1983.
- Yu Guangyuan. Modernisation socialiste de la Chine Tome I Editions en langues étrangère, 1983.
- Yu Guangyuan. Modernisation socialiste de la Chine Tome II Editions en langues étrangère, 1983.
Chinese
[edit]Economics
[edit]- 《
政治 經濟 學 ——資本 主義 部分 》于光遠 、蘇 星 ,人民 出版 社 (1978) - 《
社會 主義 市場 經濟 主體 論 》中國 財政 經濟 出版 社 (1992) - 《
我 的 市場 經濟 觀 》黑龍江 教育 出版 社 (1993) - 《
政治 經濟 學 ——社會 主義 部分 探索 (共 七 卷 )》人民 出版 社 (1984-2001) - 《
經濟 改革 雜談 》生活 ·读书·新知 三 联书店 (1996) - 《从“
新 民主 主義 社會 論 ”到 “社會 主義 初級 階段 論 ”》人民 出版 社 (1996) - 《于光
遠 短 論集 》(1977-2001共 4卷 )華 東 師範 大學 出版 社 (2001) - 《于光
遠 經濟 學 文選 》經濟 科學 出版 社 (2001) - 《于光
遠 改革 論集 》中國 發展 出版 社 (2008) - 《于光
遠 經濟 文選 》中國 時代 經濟 出版 社 (2010) - 《
經濟 學 問題 的 哲學 探 析》科學 出版 社 (2013) - 《于光
遠 經濟 論 著 全集 》(全集 共 75本 )知識 產 權 出版 社 (2015)
Social theory
[edit]- 《“
新 民主 主義 社會 論 ”的 歷史 命運 》(韓 鋼 詮 注 )長江 文藝 出版 社 (2005)
Philosophy
[edit]- 《
中國 的 科學 技術 哲學 ——自然 辯證法 》科學 出版 社 (2013) - 《一個哲學學派正在中國興起》
江西 科學 技術 出版 社 (1996) - 《
自然 辯證法 百科全書 》中國 大 百科全書 出版 社 (1995) - 《现代
公民 知 识读本 |現代 公民 知識 讀本 》(名譽 主 編 )希望 出版 社 (2006) - 《
哲學 論文 、演 講和 筆記 ,1950-1966》人民 出版 社 (1982)
Education, pedagogy, and methodology
[edit]- 《怎樣
進行 調 查研究 》中國 青年 出版 社 (1981) - 《
論 社會 科學 研究 》(1981) - 《
教育 思想 文選 》湖南 教育 出版 社 (1989) - 《
我 的 教育 思想 》河南 教育 出版 社 (1991) - 《于光
遠 馬 惠 娣十 年 對話 :關 於休閒 學 研究 的 基本 問題 》重慶 大學 出版 社 (2008)
Edited translations
[edit]- 《
勞 動 在 從 猿 到 人 轉變 過程 中 的 作用 》Friedrich Engels, translated by Yu Guangyuan, Cao Baohua.人民 出版 社 (1949) - 《
自然 辯證法 》(Natural Dialectics) Friedrich Engels, translated by Yu Guangyuan et al.人民 出版 社 (1984)
Essays and memoirs
[edit]- 《
古稀 手跡 》中國 華僑 出版 社 (1993) - 《
窗 外的 石榴 花 》作家 出版 社 (1997) - 《
酒 啦集》湖南 文藝 (1998) - 《
東方 赤子 .大家 叢書 :于光遠 卷 》華 文 出版 社 (1999) - 《
細雨 集 》重慶 出版 社 (2003) - 《碎思
錄 》重慶 出版 社 (2003) - 《
青少年 于光遠 》華 東 師範 大學 (2003) - 《
我 是 于光遠 》中國 時代 經濟 出版 社 (2003) - 《
我 的 編 年 故事 》大 象 出版 社 (2005) - 《于光
遠 自 述 》大 象 出版 社 (2005) - 《
我 眼中 的 他 們》時代 國際 出版 有限 公司 (2005) - 《
我 憶鄧小平 》時代 國際 出版 有限 公司 (2005) - 《
我 親 歷 的 那 次 歷史 大 轉 折 》中央 編 譯 局 (2008) - 《
文革 中 的 我 》廣東 人民 出版 社 (2011)
Speechwriting
[edit]- 《
解放 思想 ,實事 求 是 ,團結 一致 向 前 看 》(speech drafted for Deng Xiaoping)
Books about Yu Guangyuan
[edit]- 《
任 仲 夷 點 評 于光遠 超 短文 》Yu Guangyuan and Ren Zhongyi,海 天 出版 社 (2000) - 《
改革 黃金 年代 :我 們眼中 的 于光遠 》by Hu Jiyan, Yu Xiaodong, Liu Shiding, Han Gang.人民 出版 社 (2016)
Documentary
[edit]- "Laoma Sifeng: Yu Guangyuan" (
老 馬 嘶風: 于光遠 ) in Shandong Radio and Television documentary series Shu Fengliu Renwu (數 風流 人物 ): Part I[22] & Part II.[23]
References
[edit]- ^ "于光远". 网易财经.
- ^ "
著名 经济学 家 于光远去世 较早主 张市场经济体制 ".人民 网. - ^ Yang, Jian; Dai, Wusan (2006). Tsinghua University and Modern Chinese Technology (
清 华大学 与 中国 近 现代科技 ). Tsinghua University Press. p. 185. ISBN 9787302120148. - ^ "
走 近 于光远同志 生平 陈列展 ——年 轻的约定". Shanghai Jiading Archives. - ^
朱 ,相 远. "当代 复合型 人才 的 楷模——追 忆恩师于光 远先生 ".北京 日 报. Retrieved 17 January 2021. - ^ "【
学者 】经世学 人 于光远 ~南方 人物 周 刊 ". www.nfpeople.com. Retrieved 2021-01-16. - ^ 于,
光 远;柴 , 树藩; 彭,平 合 (1979). 绥德、米 脂 土地 问题研究 .人民 出版 社 . - ^ a b 曾,
自 . "田家 英 与 毛 岸 英 鲜为人知 的 友情 ".文 摘报. - ^
王 ,鶴 濱 (2011).毛澤東 保健 醫 生 回 憶錄.新潮社 . p. 314. ISBN 9789861678528. Retrieved 17 January 2021. - ^ Yu, Guangyuan (1995). Memoirs of the Cultural Revolution (
文革 中 的 我 ). Shanghai: Shanghai Yuandong. - ^ Zhao, Shukai (26 September 2015). "The Hinge of Fate after 1978". China Development Observation. 9.
- ^ Yu, Guangyuan; Vogel, Ezra F.; Levine, Stevine I. (2004). Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China's Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November-December 1978). EastBridge. ISBN 978-1891936531.
- ^ Wilson, Ian (1 May 1989). "Socialism with Chinese characteristics: China and the theory of the initial stage of socialism". Politics. 24 (1): 77–84. doi:10.1080/00323268908402079. ISSN 0032-3268.
- ^ Caryl, Christian (7 May 2013). "China: Year Zero". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 7 July 2018.
- ^
王 , 晓中 (2013). "中 顾委开于光 远的生活 会 ". 《炎 黄 春秋 》 (12). - ^ Bazdyrieva, Asia; Suess, Solveig. "The Future Forecast". New Silk Roads. E-Flux Architecture. Retrieved 21 April 2021.
- ^ SCMP (10 December 1997). "Party liberals prove they're no spent force". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 18 January 2021.
- ^ Kurtenbach, Elaine (28 July 1996). "Cultural Revolution's Scars Mark China". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 7 July 2018.
- ^ Ezra, Vogel (25 August 2008). Introduction: Deng Xiaoping Shakes The World An Eyewitness Account of China's Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum. EastBridge. ISBN 9781891936548.
- ^ "Summary of Congress of the World Mahjong Organization, 2007". Mindmahjong.com. 2007-11-26. Retrieved 2010-06-26.
- ^ Liu, Xiaozhuo (2 September 2011). "More than just a game". China Daily. Retrieved 7 July 2018.
- ^ "《
老 马嘶风: 于光远》于光遠 紀 錄 片 (上 )Yu Guangyuan Part I". Youtube. Retrieved 13 October 2020. - ^ "《
老 马嘶风: 于光远》于光遠 紀 錄 片 (下 )Yu Guangyuan Part II". Youtube. Retrieved 13 October 2020.
Sources
[edit]- Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China's Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November–December 1978) (Voices of Asia), translated by Ezra F. Vogel, Steven I. Levine. 2004
- Teiwes, Frederick C. (2006). "Review: Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China's Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November-December 1978) by Yu Guangyuan; Ezra F. Vogel; Steven I. Levine". Pacific Affairs. 79 (2): 315–317. JSTOR 40022705.
- "Yu Guangyuang, the economist who inspired Deng Xiaoping's reforms"
- "Chinese economist Yu Guangyuan passes away at 98"