Background
Yii I-fu was born in T’ai-an, near the city of Mukden (Shenyang) in Liaoning province.
Yii I-fu was born in T’ai-an, near the city of Mukden (Shenyang) in Liaoning province.
He graduated from Nan-k'i Middle School in Tientsin and later from Yenching in Peking.
At the end of the war against Japan, Yli was assigned to his native Manchuria. There, from 1946, he served as governor of those portions of Nunchiang under Communist control. Nun-chiang was one of the provinces in Manchuria created by the Nationalists after the war but never really occupied by them. The capital was located at Tsitsihar (Lung-chiang). He remained in this post until the winter of 1948-49 when Nunkinag was incorporated into Heilungkiang province, with Yii continuing as the governor of the reorganized province. Although already a Communist Party member, Yii was the leader in 1947 of the Tsitsihar branch of the China Democratic League, ostensibly a political party devoid of control by the CCP. From 1946 to 1949 he also served as a member of the Northeast Administrative Committee (NEAC), the governmental apparatus in charge of all Manchuria, the chairman of which was Party administrator Lin Feng. When the NEAC was reorganized into the Northeast People's Government in August 1949 (by which time Manchuria was completely in Communist hands), Yii continued to serve as a member. In the following month, he traveled to Peking to take part in the first session of the First CPPCC, the conference that brought the PRC into existence, Yii attended as a delegate from the “Northeast Liberated Areas.” Although he was not selected for membership on the permanent National Committee of the CPPCC, he apparently was associated with the CPFCC branch in Heilungkiang. This assumption is made on the basis of the fact that he attended the third session of the CPPCC (October-November 1951) as a representative of local branches of the national organization.
Like many of his colleagues, Yii was active in the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA) in the early days of the PRC. When the organization was founded in Peking in October 1949, he was named to membership on the first Executive Board, but he has not had any apparent connection with the organization since December 1954 when he attended its second national conference. Earlier, during the period from 1949 to 1952, Japanese sources identified him as a 'Responsible official” of the SSFA in Manchuria. His other extracurricular activities in Manchuria in the early 1950's included work with the peace movement. He was the chairman of the Heilungkiang Branch of the China Peace Committee as well as a member of the Northeast Work Committee of the same organization.
In November 1952, he was succeeded as the governor of Heilungkiang by Chao Te-tsun, who was subsequently purged (1955) as an accomplice of Politburo member Kao Kang. Yu was reassigned to Peking where, by the spring of 1953, he was serving under Li Wei-han as a deputy director of the Party Central Committee's United Front Department. Yii's extensive contacts with the educational field made him a logical choice for this department, whose principal activity is to gain the cooperation of China's non-Communists, especially the intellectuals. For the next several years he was reported in Peking with considerable regularity as a united front specialist, often attending forums held for the guidance and direction of the non-Party intellectuals. He was given a closely related position in March 1956 when a Study Hsueh-hsi Committee was established under the auspices of the National Committee of the CPPCC. As in the case of the United Front Department, Yii served here directly under Li Wei-han. The chief purpose of the Study Committee was to offer forums and short-term classes where the non-CCP intellectuals heard lectures and discussed Party policies.
Apart from his post in the United Front Department, YU served in the mid-1950’s in the national legislative body, the First NPC. He was a deputy from Harbin to the First NPC (1954-1959) but was not re-elected to the Second NPC, which first convened in April 1959. Yu was transferred back to Manchuria by March 1960 at which time he was elected as a secretary of the Kirin Provincial Party Committee, a position subordinate to First Secretary Wu Te, an alternate member of the Central Committee. Yii continues to hold this post. He received a government post in the Kirin Provincial Peopled Council in August 1962 when he was elected as a member of the government Council. Yii once again received an assignment at the national level in late 1964, being named a specially invited personage” to the Fourth National Committee of the CPPCC and, in addition, at the close of the first session of the National Committee in January 1965 he was selected to serve on the permanent Standing Committee.
American Communist journalist Anna Louise Strong has provided an account of Yii’s early career, based on an interview with him in 1946. Following the Mukden Incident in 1931, at which time Yii was serving as the principal of a high school in Tsitsihar, he abandoned his career as an educator to join the forces of Manchurian warlord Chang Hsueh-liang. By the mid-1930's he took a prominent part in a number of the organizations that were trying to awaken China to the realities of Japanese incursions into China. The most famous and significant of these organizations was the National Salvation Association. Also sometime in the mid-1930’s Yli became a Party member, after which he served as the chief editor of the central China branch of the Communist New China News Agency. From this work he became connected with the Communist New Fourth Army in east-central China, serving during the war as head of the “Liaison Department.”