Background
Yun was born in Wuchang, Hupeh; his family were scholar-officials who came originally from Ch’ang-chou (Wu-chin) in southern Kiangsu.
CCP member Youth League leader
Yun was born in Wuchang, Hupeh; his family were scholar-officials who came originally from Ch’ang-chou (Wu-chin) in southern Kiangsu.
He was a student at Chung-hua University in Wuchang in 1915 when the notorious Japanese “Twenty-one Demands” aroused strong anti-Japanese reactions throughout China. Yun is said to have taken part in demonstrations in Wuchang aimed at stimulating a boycott against Japanese goods. Within a short time he became more deeply involved in political activism and began to contribute (by 1917) to several magazines that propagated the “new thought” and “new literature” movements. Probably the most important of these was the Hsiti ch'ing-nien (New youth), the intellectual journal edited by Ch’en Tu-hsiu which first appeared in 1915 and came to be so closely connected with the aims of the May Fourth Movement.
In 1919 Yun graduated from Chung-hua University and took a job as director of the middle school attached to the university. His graduation coincided with the nationwide upsurge of intellectual and political activity which began with the May Fourth Movement, and his new post enabled him to remain in close contact with the student movement. He was then a member of the Young China Association (Shao- nien Chung-kuo hsueh-hui), which included such important national and local intellectuals as Li Ta-chao, Teng Chung-hsia, and Mao Tse-tung. Like much of the young intelligentsia of this period, Yun was constantly modifying his political ideas. His translation of Karl Kautsky's Class Struggle in 19192 suggests an attraction to the theories of the European social democrats. And as late as 1920 he retained a strong attachment to anarchism, a doctrine which interested a number of latter-day Communists, including Mao Tse-tung. Yun's final conversion to Marxism seems to have taken place in the first half of 1921, on the eve of the establishment of the CCP.
The industrialized Wuhan area, a key center of political agitation, witnessed a rapid growth of political and intellectual organizations, many of which sponsored magazines that propagated a wide variety of reforms in government and society. In the period from 1919 to 1921 Yun participated in the establishment and leadership in Wuhan of the Social Welfare Society (She- hui fu-li hui). Years later Mao Tse-tung mentioned the society to Edgar Snow, comparing it to the New People’s Study Society, which he and Ts'ai Ho-sen had established in Hunan in 1917-18. Mao also noted that Lin Piao, then a young teenager, had been a member of Yun’s organization.
In late 1919 Yun and his associates also established the Social Benefit Book Store (Li-ch'iin shu-she), which dealt in May Fourth and Marxian literature and which was frequented by students in Wuhan. The store had business dealings with a similar one in Changsha established by Mao Tse-tung in 1920, as well as with schools in Hunan, Anhwei, Szechwan, and Honan. Another enterprise was a small textile factory intended to demonstrate the half-work, half-study program then being advocated by many progressive intellectuals.4 In 1921 Yun and others also set up a part-time school for workers in Wuhan and another one for peasants in a rural area in nearby Huang-kang hsien. In these various endeavors Yun worked closely with Lin Yii-nan, HsiaoCh’u-nii’ LiCh’iu-shih, and other modern-minded intellectuals who ultimately became Communists. It is also probable that he was in contact with Tung Pi-wu and Ch’en T’an-ch’iu, who in late 1920 established a provisional Communist branch in Wuhan and who attended the founding congress of the CCP in mid-1921 in Shanghai. Tn this same period (1920), Yun took part in organizing the Socialist Youth League, an organization in which he would later become a top official.
Yun returned to Wuhan in 1922 where he resumed his post as director of the Chung-hua middle school. He continued his work in the student movement and through one of his students he met his wife-to-bc at this time. When Socialist Youth League leader Chang Tai-lei went to Moscow in the summer of 1923, Yun was ordered to Shanghai to work with the League. At its Second Congress in Nanking in August 1923 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the League's Central Committee and placed in charge of the Propaganda Department. He also became affiliated with the League’s official journal, Chung-kuo cWing-nien (China youth), which began publication in October 1923. Teng Chung-hsia was the first editor, but after a brief time he was succeeded by Yun and Hsiao Ch'u-nii, who coedited the journal, and then finally by Yun alone in 1924. He was well suited to the task. Although best known in the Yangtze Valley area, his political essays had appeared in youth and student publications in many other Chinese cities.
Concurrent with these duties, Yun held an instructorship at the radical Shanghai University, which, though nominally under KMT direction, was dominated by such key CCP members as Ch’U Ch’iu-pai and Teng Chung-hsia. Like many prominent Youth League and CCP members in the period after the Communists began their collaboration with the KMT (1923), Yun joined the KMT and became secretary of the Workers' and Peasants' Department of the Shanghai KMT Headquarters.
Yun was re-elected to the League’s Central Committee at the Third Congress held in Shanghai in January 1925 when the name of the organization was changed to the Communist Youth League. He was among the many Communists who helped organize the strikes in Shanghai in May 1925 (the “May 30th Movement”) which caused considerable disruption there and rapidly spread to other urban areas (see under Li Li-san.) A number of Yun’s writings were published in this period by the Shanghai Book Store (Shang-hai shu-tien), which had been established by the CCP in November 1923. In 1925 it published a four-volume text, which Yun edited for use in evening classes run by the Party for Shanghai workers.
From Shanghai Yun went to Canton where in January 1926 he was elected a member of the KMT Central Executive Committee at the Second KMT Congress. Other prominent Communists elected to the CEC at this time of rather close KMT-CCP collaboration included Li Ta-chao, Wu Yii-chang, and Lin Po-ch’ii, Mao Tse-tung was among the Communists elected an alternate CEC member. In March of that year Yun became chief political instructor at the Whampoa Militaiy Academy. Apart from his teaching responsibilities at Whampoa, he also taught at the KMT Peasant Movement Training Institute, which came under increasing Communist domination (see under P’eng P’ai). During its sixth class, when Mao headed the Institute (May-October 1926), Yun lectured on Chinese history.
By July 1927 CCP relations with the left-KMT had all but ended, and when a warrant was issued for Yun’s arrest he took refuge with relatives in a nearby village. However, within a few days he was in Chiu-chiang (Kiukiang) and then in Nanchang where he played a major role in planning and executing the Nanchang Uprising on August 1, the date now used by the Communists as the birth of the Red Army (see under Yeh T'ing). In particular, he seems to have had an important part in persuading Ho Lung to bring his 20th KMT Army over to the Communist side. Immediately after staging the revolt, the Communists established a 25-member Revolutionary Committee, as well as its seven-member Presidium. Yun was named to both bodies, and he was also appointed acting commissar for Propaganda (in place of Kuo Mo-jo). The Communists were routed from Nanchang within a few days, after which they marched south to Kwangtung. Yun made the march south to Swatow, which was held for a few days in late September. When they were again defeated, Yun fled to the nearby Communist stronghold at Lu-feng, and from there he made his way to Hong Kong.
Yun remained in Hong Kong for a few weeks, and then he went to Canton where the Communists made still another attempt to capture a major city. After the uprising there on December 11, 1927, Yun was made secretary-general of the short-lived Canton Commune, which was headed by Chang T’ai-lei, who lost his life there. Within less than three days the Communists were totally defeated, and the survivors fled in various directions. Yun went to Hong Kong again where he edited a Communist newspaper and worked in the Party underground.
In the summer of 1928 Yun went to Shanghai where he became secretary-general of the Party's Propaganda Department and contributed to leading Communist journals such as Pu-erh- sai-wei-k'o (Bolshevik). With the CCP now outlawed, its cadres carried on their activities underground; conditions were precarious and the Nationalist police were constantly on the alert for “dangerous agitators.” Under these circumstances the CCP held its Sixth Congress in Moscow. Convened in mid-1928, the Congress elected Yun in absentia to the new Central Committee. The new central organs of the CCP soon came to be dominated by Li Li-san Yun’s opposition to Li’s headstrong leadership was reflected in the numerous articles he wrote in 1928 and 1929, and by the latter year Yun’s authority in the CCP had been sharply diminished. In the fall of 1929 Li's Central Committee, possibly to get Yun out of the way, sent him from Shanghai to the west Fukien area to investigate the difficulties that a small group of Communist guerrillas were experiencing. When he returned to Shanghai in early 1930 he was given the modest position of committee secretary in the well-known Chapei district of Shanghai and later in the eastern section of the city. Work there was especially dangerous and Yun did not long survive police vigilance.
In April 1930, after attending a union meeting, he was caught and jailed in nearby Soochow. When first imprisoned he concealed his real identity; he was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison, still under an assumed name. When Ch'ii Ch'iu-pai and Chou En-lai returned to China from Moscow in mid-1930 they sought to arrange for Yun’s escape. Their efforts failed, however, because Yun’s identity as an important Communist was revealed by a CCP defector, Ku Shun-chang. Yun, by then imprisoned in Nanking, was executed by the Nationalists on April 29, 1931. Speaking before the Eighth Party Congress many years later (1956), Li Li-san mentioned Yun’s death in the course of an effusive confession of past “mistakes.” Li asserted that the excesses of his past leadership in the 1928-1930 period had caused the death of some “splendid cadres.” Yun was the only one of those he mentioned.
Yun himself joined the Party in 1921, and in the late summer of that year he and his colleague Li Ch’iu-shih went to Lu-chou in southern Szechwan where they established the Lu-chou Associated Normal School, with Yun as the director. Within a short time they established Socialist Youth League and CCP branches in the school Yun also arranged for Li Ta-chao and Teng Chung-hsia (fellow members of the Young China Association) to come to Szechwan for a lecture tour. In 1922 Yun was arrested in Lu-chou by gendarmes in the employ of a Szechwanese military leader. He was released through the intervention of Wu Yii-chang, who was a rather prominent KMT member before joining the CCP in 1925. After Yun's release he went to Chengtu where, at the invitation of Wu Yii-chang, he taught at the Chengtu Higher Normal Institute, of which Wu was the president. A popular lecturer and already well-known to students through his prolific writings, Yun apparently also taught for a brief time in the early twenties at Mao Tse-tung's alma mater, the Hunan First Normal School in Changsha
Yun was married for a second time in late 1926 or early 1927 to Shen Pao-ying. They had a son bom in 1928. Shcn worked in the Shanghai underground with Yun after 1928 and took part in the futile attempt to arrange for her husband’s escape from prison. Nothing is known about her subsequent career, but in 1957 she wrote a sketch about Yun's career for Chung-kuo ch'ing-tiien. Yun's younger brother, Yun Tzu-ch’iang (1899-1963), was a prominent scientist, who remained on the mainland after 1949. A CCP member, he was identified at the time of his death as a vice-chairman of the China Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Society and a vice-chairman of the Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry Department of the Academy of Sciences.
