Yao Yilin

Yao Yilin ( Chinese  姚依林 ; born September 6, 1917 in Hong Kong ; † December 11, 1994 ) was a Chinese communist politician, former deputy prime minister and former member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China .

Origin and time of the Second World War

The son of a large landowner attended a Christian school . He later graduated from Tsinghua University . While still a student, he joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1935 . During the civil war he was political commissar of the People's Liberation Army from 1937 to 1949 .

Establishment of the People's Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, he became an employee of the party administration and increasingly specialized in economic affairs. In this area he gained a reputation as a pragmatic economic planner .

In early 1960 he became Minister of Commerce . In 1967 he was dismissed from this office as part of the Cultural Revolution . Only in 1973 did his rehabilitation take place .

Promotion to the Standing Committee and loss of power

Yao Yilin was elected as a candidate for the Central Committee (Central Committee) at the 10th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress in 1973 . At the 11th Congress in 1977 he was elected a member of the Central Committee for the first time, to which he was a member until the 13th Congress of the CCP in 1992.

Since July 2, 1979, through the sponsorship of Deng Xiaoping, he was Deputy Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China . In this role he was mainly responsible for economic policy. From 1980 he was also a member of the Central Committee's secretariat, where he was also responsible for economic affairs. In these offices he also advocated more intensive economic relations with the Soviet Union , which led to the signing of a trade agreement in 1985 .

At the 12th party congress in September 1982 he was made a candidate and in 1985 a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. At the 13th CCP Congress in 1987, he was also elected a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party . He thus belonged to the closest leadership circle of the party leadership, in which he belonged to the hardliner faction around the later General Secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin , and the then Prime Minister Li Peng , and with them called for a violent crackdown on the student riots that took place on April 3 and 4 June 1989 led to the Tiananmen massacre .

After the CCP's 14th Congress in 1992, he lost all office because of his age.

Web links

• Article on the death of Yao Yilin. In: Berliner Zeitung . December 13, 1994, accessed September 4, 2015 . 
• No Search For “Quick Results” , article in TIME magazine from March 16, 1981 ( Memento from February 4, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
• China , article in TIME magazine on October 9, 1989
• Obituary: Yao Yilin . In: The Independent of December 13, 1994