Chen Yun (1905–1995)

Chinese communist politician and economic planner. An economics expert, he was the second-ranking ‘party elder’ at the time of his death. A veteran of the Long March of 1934–35, he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo for a record 53 years (1934–87). He favoured a planned economy in which market forces would be allowed to operate in a controlled manner, ‘like a bird in a cage’. Formerly an ally of China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, Chen became a conservative opponent in his later years, voicing concern at the destabilizing effects of Deng's ‘uncaged’ market socialism.

Early career Chen was born near Shanghai, trained as a typesetter, and joined the CCP in 1925, just four years after it was founded. In Shanghai, he helped organize an armed workers' uprising in 1927, before joining Mao Zedong and the Red Army in their mountain base in Jiangxi province in 1933. At the crucial Zunyi conference of May 1935, which established Mao's ascendancy within the party, Chen sided with Mao and became a close aide of the party leader. After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, he became a leading economic policymaker, but criticized Mao's disastrous experimental Great Leap Forward (1958–62) to communism, which was based on the establishment of large agricultural and industrial communes, and resulted in more than 20 million famine deaths.

During the early 1960s, Chen oversaw the reconstruction of the Chinese economy through the reintroduction of private farming plots and markets. Although he fell temporarily from power during the mid-1960s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, unlike many other senior figures, he retained his seat on the CCP's influential Central Committee.

The Deng Xiaoping era Chen became an ally of Deng Xiaoping during the latter's rise to power in 1977–78 and supported Deng's early market-centred economic reforms. However, convinced of the merits of a ‘birdcage economy’, he expressed concern from the later 1980s that market forces were being allowed to run out of control, with serious social and political consequences.

Although he retired from the CCP Central Committee in 1987 due to ailing health, Chen remained influential behind the scenes and wielded significant patronage power as one of the ‘Eight Immortals’ who had ruled China since the communist victory 1949. His death left only five ‘Immortals’, including Deng, alive.