Education
Nothing is known of his youth until 1935 when he was a student in Peking, probably at Tsinghua University. On December 9 of that year a student demonstration was staged in opposition to KMT policies, which were regarded as ineffectual in resisting the steady Japanese incursions into north China. From these demonstrations there arose a nationwide campaign, known as the December Ninth Movement (see under Li Ch’ang), which involved thousands of students. To carry their views to the peasantry, several student propaganda teams set out in early January 1936 for the rural areas to the south of Peking.
Yu joined a group that was led by Tsinghua students and included Li Ch’ang, one of the major youth leaders of the period. After returning to Peking, the students formed the National Liberation Vanguards of China (NLVC), an organization that within the year was to come under Communist control. Yu joined the NLVC, and then in July 1937, following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, he fled Peking for Paoting and went from there to Taiyuan in Shansi, where the NLVC made its headquarters until the city fell to the Japanese in November 1937. By 1938 he was in Wuhan where he headed the branch office of the NLVC, working in cooperation with Li Ch’ang, Chiang Nan-hsiang, and Huang Hua, all of whom later became important CCP members. Yii and the others worked in Wuhan under the direction of the Party's Yangtze Bureau.
Career
Yii’s wartime career is not documented but it is probable that he, like many of the “December &inth’’ students, was engaged principally in youth and propaganda work. His later career suggests that he might also have studied at one of the Party schools in north or northwest China. In 1948 he was working in Shih-chia-chuang, Hopeh, an important city that had fallen to the Communists in the previous November and that served as the Communists capital until they moved into Peking in early 1949. While in Shih-chia-chuang, Yii was engaged in the translation of Marxian works into Chinese, he then went to Peking, where in July 1949 he participated in two large conferences, one of philosophers and the other of social science uworkers. In the ensuing years Yii was to spend much of his time working with social scientists, but in addition he has also worked closely with natural scientists. In this regard Yii is distinguished from a number of Party leaders who can be rather distinctly separated into two categories: the social scientist administrators (e.g” Ch’en Po-ta) and the natural science administrators (e.g., Nieh Jung-chen). In general, Yii has worked in both fields.
By 1952 Yii was one of the editors of Hsueh-hsi. It is clear that in the early years of the PRC his time was devoted principally to pedagogical and ideological work for Chun-kuo ch'ing-nien and Hsueh-hsi, but by the mid-fifties Yii had become more involved in social and natural science administrative work. Thus, in February 1955 he was named to a committee to organize popular lectures on atomic energy, and in May- June 1955, when the Academy of Sciences established four major academic departments, Yii was appointed to Standing Committee membership in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, a position he still holds. These two appointments one in the natural and the other in the social sciences illustrate the manner in which he has worked in both fields. Early in 1956 the PRC embarked on a large-scale 12-year program to improve science in China, and to implement the plan the government established the Scientific Planning Commission in March 1956. Yii served as one of the deputy secretaries-general, a post he held until the commission was merged with the State Technological Commission in November 1958 to form the Scientific and Technological Commission (STC). He was appointed an STC vice-chairman and works under Nieh Jung-chen, China's top science administrator. In addition to these posts in the executive branch of government, Yii also serves in the legislature, having been elected a Hupeh deputy to the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964.
Yii was back in Europe in October 1960 for meetings in Budapest of the Communist-dominated World Federation of Scientific Workers, and in November-December he and physicist Chou P’ei-yuan were in Moscow to attend one of the “Pugwash Conferences,” a name derived from the village in Canada where the first conference was held in 1957, under the auspices of American industrialist Cyrus Eaton. These conferences, which have brought together distinguished scientists from both Communist and non-Communist nations (including the United States), are among the very few in which both Chinese and Americans have participated, but they have been boycotted by Peking since 1960 as a result of the Sino-Soviet rift. Yii was abroad again in October 1964 when he accompanied Ulanfu to Berlin for the 15th anniversary of the East German government. Two months before this he had been one of the deputy leaders of the Chinese delegation to the 1964 Peking Symposium, an important conference attended by 367 social and natural scientists from 44 nations, most of them in Asia, Africa, or Latin America (see under delegation leader Chou P'ei-yuan).
Politics
Yii was newly identified in a post subordinate to the CCP Central Committee at the Party’s Eighth Congress in September 1956 when he spoke on scientific achievements and problems before the Congress in his capacity as director of the Propaganda Department's Science Division.5 He stressed the priorities that had been given to the development of science, urged better working conditions for scientists, and advocated greater study of Soviet science and experience. He may still be Science Division director, but he has not been identified as such since mid-1958. In October 1956 he was appointed a deputy director of the State Council’s Bureau of Experts, an organ apparently responsible for the placement of high-level scientific and technical personnel; Yu retained this post until the bureau was abolished in June 1959 and its functions were placed under the above-mentioned Scientific and Technological Commission.
In December 1956 he became a member of the Academic Committee of the Academy of Science^ newly established Institute of Psychology, and in November of the following year he was a member of Kuo Mo-jo’s academy delegation sent to the Soviet Union to attend the celebrations commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and to negotiate scientific cooperation agreements with Soviet officials and scientists.
