Background
Guangyuan Yu was born on July 5, 1915 in Shanghai, China. Yu Guangyuan's maternal uncle is the late Qing and early Republican politician Cao Rulin. Yu's father served briefly in the Republican government during Yuan Shikai's presidency.
于光远
Guangyuan Yu was born on July 5, 1915 in Shanghai, China. Yu Guangyuan's maternal uncle is the late Qing and early Republican politician Cao Rulin. Yu's father served briefly in the Republican government during Yuan Shikai's presidency.
Guangyuan Yu attended Shanghai Datong High School and Utopia University before enrolling at the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
His classmates at Tsinghua included Qian Sanqiang, He Zehui and Wang Daheng. Yu graduated from Tsinghua in 1936, but chose a different path of career. He emerged as a student leader in the December 9th movement (1935), organized the National Liberation Pioneers (Mingxian), which was intended to broaden the anti-Japanese alliance, and joined the Chinese Communist Party shortly before the Japanese invasion.
In 1975 Guangyuan Yu was assigned as a senior member of the Party Research Office of the State Council, and later of the Political Research Office. He served concurrently as the deputy president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a deputy director of the Science and Technology Commission of the State Council.
Guangyuan Yu worked closely with Deng Xiaoping before and during Deng’s periods of ascendancy, and drafted the reformist leader's famous speech at the Third Plenary Session. He was a "major author of the whole concept" of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Active in economic policy, Guangyuan Yu contributed to Deng's plan to develop Shenzhen as an economic zone. He proposed even to facilitate borders control between Hong Kong and Shenzhen to boost economic activity and foreign trade, as early as in 1978. The next year, he worked with Xi Zhongxun on the development of Shekou. In the 1980s, he turned similar attention to Hainan.