Chen Yizi, a Top Adviser Forced to Flee China, Dies at 73
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Version 0 of 1. Chen Yizi, who helped reshape China’s economy in the 1980s but who was deemed a counterrevolutionary after defending the student-led protests that filled Tiananmen Square in 1989, died in exile on April 14 in Los Angeles. He was 73. The cause was cancer, his wife, Xiao Yu, said. Working in a succession of research institutes, Mr. Chen, a top government adviser, pushed reforms to rebuild China and open it to wider trade. One controversial step he endorsed was ending rural communes and a policy of returning Chinese to family farms. “He was a bridge to new ideas,” said Wang Juntao, who as a student activist met Mr. Chen in 1979 and renewed their friendship in exile in the United States. “Chen Yizi believed that there was an opportunity to influence the Communist Party when it was at a time of uncertainty about its direction,” Mr. Wang said. “Behind the scenes, he was very influential in bringing new people and thinking into the system.” Mr. Chen headed the Institute for Economic Structural Reform and became a close ally of Zhao Ziyang, who was prime minister and then party general secretary. Mr. Chen “infused the early reforms with energy,” said Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of politics at Boston University, who knew Mr. Chen and wrote about his role in China’s reforms. But Mr. Chen’s fortunes changed when the student-led protests erupted across China in 1989. Communist Party hard-liners were outraged and pressed for a tough response. Moderate leaders, led by Mr. Zhao, favored a more conciliatory approach. Deng Xiaoping, the nation’s top leader, backed the hard-liners, and Mr. Zhao was shunted aside. Mr. Chen sought to rally intellectuals and party moderates to support the students, while also seeking to defuse the crisis. On the morning of June 4, 1989, after soldiers had moved through Beijing overnight and shot at crowds resisting their advance to Tiananmen Square, Mr. Chen resigned from the party to protest the crackdown. He became a fugitive and escaped to Hong Kong, then to France and finally to the United States, where he continued to advocate for democratic change in China. For a time, he lived in Princeton, N.J., where he took part in the Princeton China Initiative, which included other exiles and studied China’s economic and political conditions. “Even when he was in exile abroad, his main energies and work were still concerned about reforming China,” said Wu Renhua, a participant in the Tiananmen Square protests who also left Beijing after 1989 and settled in Los Angeles. “Chen Yizi was one of those who underwent a quite clear change after he left China, and people listened to him because he knew how the system worked from the inside.” Mr. Chen was born in Sichuan Province, in southwest China, in 1940, the son of a hydroengineer. He won a place at Peking University and studied physics and Chinese. In 1965 he was condemned as a “counterrevolutionary revisionist” for submitting a letter to party leaders in which he challenged blind obedience to Mao Zedong. Like millions of other urban youth, he was sent to labor in the countryside, an experience that exposed him to the harsh poverty of a great majority of rural people. After he returned to Beijing in 1979, he worked his way up as an adviser on rural policy before he was named to head the Institute for Economic Structural Reform. Besides his wife, Mr. Chen is survived by a daughter, Wu Sheng, from an earlier marriage. |