Background
Chen Yun was born on June 13, 1905 Shanghai, China.
Chen Yun was born on June 13, 1905 Shanghai, China.
It is known very little about his family background and education except that he reportedly had a primary school education. At age fifteen he was employed by the Shanghai Commercial Press, a known publishing firm in modern China, as a typesetter and sales person.
More conservative than Deng and even more willing to stick to Mao Zedong’s thought, Chen nonetheless adopted a more pragmatic approach to economic management than Mao. Chen was a main architect of the centrally planned economy and of the first Five Year Plan in the early 1950s. Within that context, Chen favored greater importance for markets and for decentralization of decision-making, even during the early years of the construction of a command economy. He was critical of the Great Leap and was accused of following the ‘capitalist road’ during the Cultural Revolution. In the aftermath of the disasters of the Great Leap, Chen worked to reconstruct the economy on the basis of a limited but significant role for market incentives. This contrasted sharply with Mao’s approach of using mass mobilization and ideological fervor to spark growth. For these efforts Chen was purged during the Cultural Revolution.
Following Mao’s death, Chen returned to positions of influence and became an important advocate against using Mao’s thought as the basis for policy. Expressing concern over the Party’s ability to retain its legitimacy among the people, Chen asserted the need to expand production and to improve the life of the Chinese people. His political support was essential to the success of Deng Xiaoping in gaining pre-eminent power and in moving toward economic reforms. His main contribution to economic reform was to promote a greater role for markets even as central planning provided a basic framework for production decisions. Probably inadvertently, this effort to introduce markets gradually helped promote the ultimate success of the reforms as contrasted to the much more radical introduction of markets in the former Soviet Union. Chen’s preference for gradualism led in 1984 to significant differences with Deng over the pace of marketization, which led to considerable inflation and later to political unrest at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Though an advocate of markets, Chen was firmly committed to socialism and not to capitalism. Chen favored economic growth and was ready to use Western technology and even capital to accomplish this. But he was also very suspicious of the influence of foreigners and concerned about retaining socialism as the ultimate goal for China. His conservatism about the capitalist features of China’s economic reform resulted in his resignation from the Central Committee in 1982. Nonetheless, he retained considerable influence until 1989 and the Tiananmen Square crisis. Chen remained an important political source of the turn to reform but he also reflected the considerable challenge that reform presented to the communist tradition in China.
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 not considered corrupt. Chen's political perspective is generally viewed as liberal until about 1980, but conservative after about 1984. Although it could be argued that his opposition to radicalism, be it Maoism or neoliberalism, represented a consistent conservative position similar to other paleo-left politicians like the British politician Peter Shore or the French politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement.