1. Chen Yun was a Chinese revolutionary leader who was one of the most influential leaders of the People's Republic of China during the 1980s and 1990s and one of the major architects and important policy makers for the reform and opening up period, alongside Deng Xiaoping.
Chen Yun was known as Liao Chenyun, as he took his uncle's family name when he was adopted by him after his parents died.
Chen Yun became the head of the CCP's Organization Department in 1937, and became one of CCP leader Mao Zedong's close advisors.
Chen Yun 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.
Chen Yun was instrumental in China's economic reconstruction following the disastrous Great Leap Forward 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 Yun was demoted during the Cultural Revolution though he returned to power after Mao's death in 1976.
Chen Yun resigned from the Central Committee in 1987 though keeping his influence as the chairman of the Central Advisory Committee until 1992, when he fully retired from politics.
Chen Yun was typesetter for the famous Commercial Press of Shanghai, which printed revolutionary books and even Protestant Bibles.
Chen Yun played a prominent role as a younger organizer in the labor movement during the early and mid-1920s, joining the Chinese Communist Party in 1924.
Chen Yun 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.
Chen Yun was active throughout his career in the field of economics, despite receiving no formal education after elementary school.
Chen Yun 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.
Chen Yun was in overall charge of the Party's "white areas" work, that is, underground activities in places not under Party control.
Chen Yun 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.
In 1937 Chen Yun returned to China as an adviser to the Xinjiang leader Sheng Shicai.
Chen Yun later joined Mao in Yan'an, probably before the end of 1937.
Chen Yun added Northeast China to his portfolio in 1946.
Chen Yun argued that the approach should rely on both economic and political mechanisms, including regulating the value of competing currencies and controlling trade in key commodities.
In May 1949, Chen Yun was named head of the new national Central Finance and Economic Commission.
In 1956, when the 8th National Congress of Chinese Communist Party was held, Chen Yun was elected a vice chairman of the Central Committee.
Around that time, both Mao and Chen Yun 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 Yun believed that markets should have a larger economic role but remain subject to a state-controlled plan.
Chen Yun used the metaphor of a caged bird to describe the socialist economy.
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.
Chen Yun retained his positions as Party vice chairman and member of the Politburo and continued to express his opinions behind the scenes.
Chen Yun proposed that a balance should be found between "setting the bird free" and choking the bird with a central plan that was too restrictive; this theory would later become a focal point of criticism against Chen Yun during the Cultural Revolution.
Chen Yun's 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 Chen shaking hands with Chairman Mao, while Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Deng Xiaoping look on.
Chen Yun was re-elected to the Central Committee in the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969 but not to the Politburo.
Chen Yun was put to work in a factory in Nanchang in Jiangxi province, where he stayed for three years.
Chen Yun raised the six issues in order to undermine Hua and his leftist supporters.
Chen Yun'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 Yun laid the basis for Deng's "reform and opening" program.
In July 1979, Chen Yun was named head of the new national Economic and Financial Commission staffed with his own allies and conservative economic planners.
Chen Yun deplored Mao's dictatorial ways and implied, although not very strongly, that the Party should take a milder line against dissidents.
The old dynasties, Chen Yun said, knew the value of a policy of yielding or retreating from untenable positions.
The reforms of the early 1980s were, in effect, the implementation, finally, of the program Chen Yun had outlined in the mid-1950s.
In 1982 Chen Yun, who was 77 years old, stepped down from the Politburo and Central Committee and served as Chairman of the new Central Advisory Commission, an institution set up to provide a place for leadership of the founding generation to remain involved in public affairs.
Chen Yun played an active role in the "Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign" organised in late 1983, to help safeguard China's political status quo and domestic stability.
Chen Yun was widely admired and respected for striking a balance between excessive laissez faire capitalism and retaining state leadership in guiding China's market economy.
Chen Yun was not, in principle, opposed to the scope of Deng's reforms; China's economic policy had effectively frozen consumer prices for decades, to the point that prices in China no longer had much relationship to the relative value of resources, goods, or services.
Chen Yun objected to the way in which the urban reforms were carried out.
Chen Yun argued that, if there were to be such bonuses, they should be gauged to increased productivity.
Chen Yun's theory had been that the market should supplement the plan.
Chen Yun was much less enthusiastic about the market than Deng Xiaoping and Deng's younger colleagues.
Chen Yun was skeptical regarding the special economic zones, viewing them as a non-socialist experiment.
Chen Yun viewed the development of a socialist market economy as unscientific and unrealistic.
Chen Yun supported the vigorous campaign in the early 1980s against the "three kinds of people", a general purge of all those who had been identified with radical factions during the Cultural Revolution.
Chen Yun made common cause with conservatives among other Party elders.
In Zhao's autobiography, Chen Yun was one of the few elders who Zhao referred to regularly as a "comrade".
Chen Yun agreed that 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.
However, Chen Yun succeeded Deng as the Chairman of the Central Advisory Committee.
In October 1992 at the age of 87, Chen Yun retired from politics along with other party elders at the 14th Party Congress when the Central Advisory Committee was abolished.
Chen Yun was known for his foundational role in spearheading the reform and opening up alongside Deng Xiaoping.
Chen Yun was praised for implementing many of the reforms that made the new generation of Chinese richer, but was admired for striking a balance between too much laissez-faire economics and retaining state control over key areas of the market.
Chen Yun was liberal in the beginning, but later more cautious and conservative, especially in his last years.
Chen Yun was widely admired by the Chinese populace, known for his wide-sweeping economic strategic planning, morality and incorruptibility.
Chen Yun remains one of China's most powerful and influential leaders, especially in the PRC's first 50 years, as he was a central decision-maker for the CCP, serving on the Central Committee and Politburo for over 40 years.
Chen Yun's theories supported the efforts of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao to use state power to provide boundaries for the operation of the market, and to mediate the damage that capitalism can do to those who find it difficult to benefit from the free market.
Whatever the wisdom of his substantive positions, Chen Yun consistently appeared to act on principle rather than for personal advantage, and retained his influence in the party throughout the Mao and Deng eras.