He was born about 1915 in Anhwei Province into a prominent and presumably well- to-do family. His father, who died in Yao's infancy, had been a supporter of Yuan Shih-k’ai and a prominent official in Peking during the latter years of the Ch’ing Dynasty. Yao’s real name was Yao K’o-kuang, a name he was still using through his college days in the midthirties.
In his youth he studied at a Christian school. He then regarded himself as a Christian, and it was probably during these years that he gained his fluency in English. Yao attended a middle school attached to Kuang-hua University in Shanghai in the early thirties where, according to a former schoolmate, he was one of the top students and known for his articulateness. In 1934 he enrolled in Tsinghua University in Peking where he majored in history, and at this time or soon thereafter became a member of the CCP.
There is little reporting on Yao’s activities in the war and postwar years, but it is apparent that he, like many of his fellow students in Peking, went to the Communist-held areas of north or northwest China when war erupted against Japan in mid-1937. According to the few available reports, he served during the war as secretary-general of the Northern Sub-bureau that was subordinate to the Party’s North China Bureau, here again probably under P'eng Chen, and on December 13, 1945 he wrote an article commemorating the 10th anniversary of the “December Ninth” movement for the leading Communist newspaper in north China, the Yenan Chieh-fang jih-pao (Liberation daily). By 1946 he was serving as a political commissar with the Communist forces in the Chin-Ch'a- Chi (Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh) Border Region (see under Nieh Jung-chen). This appears to be Yao5s only association with the Red armies, a career pattern that is typical of many students of the mid-thirties, most of whom were engaged during the war years in youth or propaganda work and who later, after the Communist government was established in 1949, moved into fields that required a rather sophisticated educational background. Other contemporaries of Yao's of whom this can be said include Li Ch’ang and Chiang Nan-hsiang.
In the late forties Yao remained in the Chin- Ch'a-Chi area, the government of which was merged with the Chi n-Chi-Lu-YU (Shansi- Hopeh-Shantung-Honan) Border Region Government to form the North China People’s Government (NCPG) in August 1948. The NCPG moved from Shih-chia-chuang, Hopeh to Peking in early 1949, remaining in existence until its functions were absorbed by the new central government in October 1949. Yao’s duties within the NCPG were a precursor to what has come to be his special field of competence-finance and economics. Under the NCPG Yao headed the Industry and Commerce Department and also served as a member of its Finance and Economics Committee. He received a similar assignment in October 1949 under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet) when he was appointed a vice-minister of Trade under veteran Communist Yeh Chi-chuang.
The Ministry of Trade was responsible for both domestic commerce and foreign trade, and it is evident that Yao was involved in both fields. On the domestic side he became in 1950 a member of two organizations whose functions were closely related to the Trade Ministry. The first of these, the All-China Federation of Cooperatives (ACFC), has major responsibilities for coordinating the exchange of commodities between the rural and urban areas. Yao became a member of the Federation’s provisional Board of Directors in July 1950, and in November of that year was elected to the Board’s Standing Committee. When the ACFC was established on a permanent basis in July 1952, Yao continued as a Standing Committee member, and he has been a member of the National Committee since mid-1954 when the Federation was reorganized and renamed the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives. The other organization particularly related to domestic commerce to which Yao belongs is the China Democratic National Construction Association (CD-NCA) which, though nominally a political party, is more akin to a chamber of commerce and is composed mainly of industrialists and businessmen, most of them non-Communists. Yao was a member of the CDNCA Standing Committee from 1950 to 1952, and since 1955 has been a member of its Central Committee. He also took a prominent part in the numerous movements in the early fifties to economize and increase production, serving in 1951-1952, for example, as a member of the central government’s “austerity examination committee” that was chaired by top economic specialist Po I-po.
Yao was equally active in the field of foreign trade in the early fifties, particularly with other Communist nations. In early 1951 he signed trade agreements with Hungarian and Polish officials in Peking, and from March to June of the same year he was in Moscow negotiating a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. Immediately after returning home he signed another trade agreement with Polish representatives (July 1951). He ceased to have much involvement in foreign trade after August 1952 when the Ministry of Trade was divided into the Ministries of Foreign Trade and Commerce, with Yao assigned as a vice-minister of the latter, serving under Minister Tseng Shan.
Yao was reappointed to his vice-ministership immediately after the close of the initial session of the First NPC in September 1954, the legislative body that brought the constitutional government into existence. He served throughout the term of the First NPC (1954-1959) as a deputy from Kiangsi, and was also a member of the NPCs permanent Budget Committee as well as of the ad hoc Motions Examinations Committee for the second through the fifth NPC sessions held from mid-1955 to early 1958. Speaking in June 1956 before the third NPC session, Yao admitted to criticisms that had been directed to the Ministry of Commerce, addressing himself in particular to the problems of the shoddy quality of goods as well as the insufficiency of certain commodities produced under the direction of the Ministry. There is little to indicate, however, that these admissions adversely affected his career. In fact, he spoke soon after at the Party's Eighth Congress, held in September 1956, and when the Congress was convened again for a second session in May 1958, he was elected an alternate member of the Party's Central Committee.
In February 1958, during a partial reorganization of the State Council, the Ministry of Commerce was renamed the First Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Urban Services was retitled the Second Ministry of Commerce. Yao continued as a vice-minister in the First Ministry, thereby continuing to serve under Ch'en Yun, then China's top economic expert, who had succeeded Tseng Shan in November 1956. Then, in still another reorganization of September 1958, the two ministries were recombined under the previous name, the Ministry of Commerce. Yao remained a vice-minister, now serving under Ch’eng Tzu-hua a leading figure in the Cooperatives Federation who had succeeded Ch’en Yun then falling into political decline, presumably because of opposition to the policies of the Great Leap Forward inaugurated earlier in the year. Yao advanced to an even more important post in the economic bureaucracy in September 1959 when he was appointed a deputy director of the Finance and Trade Office, responsible for coordinating the activities of the State Council's commissions, ministries, and bureaus concerned with financial and trade matters. He still retains this post, working under Director Li Hsien-nien, Peking’s leading financial specialist since the mid-fifties. A few days after receiving the State Council appointment, in writing an article on commercial work in the first decade of the PRC (JMJP, September 28, 1959), he was identified as a deputy director of the Party Central Committee^ Finance and Trade Work Department, the Party’s counterpart to the government Finance and Trade Office. In this position Yao came under Director Ma Ming-fang, but when Ma was transferred to Manchuria in 1961 it appears that Yao succeeded him as the de facto director. Yao rose to his highest Party position by June 1964 when he was identified as director of the Central Committee's Finance and Trade Political Department; this “political” department was a reorganization of the former “work” department and reflected a movement begun in the early part of 1964 to inject greater political control into virtually all aspects of the Chinese economy. In the meantime, in February 1960, Yao had succeeded Ch’eng Tzu-hua as head of the Ministry of Commerce, another post he retains. As a consequence, Yao directs the Party’s top finance and trade department and the Ministry of Commerce, and is the number two man under Li Hsien-nien in the State Council’s Finance and Trade Office, a combination of positions that places him among the PRC's key economic officials.
Yao was one of the participants in the December Ninth” movement that broke out on December 9, 1935 when students at the major Peking universities demonstrated against KMT policies they regarded as impotent in the face of steady encroachments by the Japanese on Chinese sovereignty in north China. It is not clear if Yao took part in the initial phases of the movement, but by early 1936 he was already deeply involved. According to an account by Li Ch’ang, in whose biography the movement is described in greater detail, Yao was briefly arrested on the Tsinghua campus on February 29, 1936, but he was able to escape immediately. Li describes Yao as then engaging in Party work in Peking.5 Yao remained at Tsinghua for another year before he was expelled, presumably for his political activities.
During Yao’s college days he was a close colleague of Huang Ching one of the leading participants in the December Ninth's movement, and it is also likely that he was close to P’eng T’ao, another student leader. All three men were to rise to Party Central Committee stature in the 1950's, and when Huang died in 1958 and P'ing in 1961, Yao was a member of the funeral committee for both men. It is also probable that he was taking orders in the thirties from P’eng Chen who seems to have been the leading CCP figure in Peking soon after the movement began.
