Yao Yilin (191–1994)

Chinese communist politician. During the 1960s he served as commerce minister, but was purged in 1967, during the ‘anti-bourgeois’ Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, having been branded a ‘three-anti-element’. However, he was rehabilitated in 1973 and, with the support of the reformist Deng Xiaoping, was made a vice premier in 1979. As a member of the policy-making Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretariat 1980–85 and Politburo from 1985, Yao oversaw economic planning during the 1980s at a time when radical ‘market socialist’ reforms were being introduced by the prime minister, Zhao Ziyang, transforming the Chinese economy.

Yao was an equivocal supporter of these reforms since he believed in the need to maintain CCP central control so as to correct regional disparities and prevent social unrest. Consequently, he emerged as a conservative figure within the new ‘Dengist’ leadership and was instrumental in securing the appointment of the more cautious Li Peng as prime minister, when Zhao became party leader in 1987. Yao was also a proponent of closer relations with Russia, signing a trade pact in July 1985. He also supported Deng and Li Peng in the use of force to crush the June 1989 student pro-democracy movement. In October 1992, he retired from the CCP Politburo to make way for a younger echelon of party leaders.

Born in Anhui province, the son of a landlord, Yao was educated at a Christian school and later studied at Qinghua University. He joined the CCP in 1935, while still at university, and served as political commissar in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) during the liberation struggle and civil war of 1937–49. After the communist triumph in 1949, Yao became a party bureaucrat, specializing in economic affairs, where he gained a reputation as a pragmatic economic planner.