Activities and affiliations

Government and administration PRC state institutions 1893–1981 ○ Natural causes

Sun Yat-sen’s widow who stayed with the Kuomintang left and became a vice-chair of the People’s Republic

At the 1922 mutiny she stayed behind to cover Sun Yat-sen's escape, saying 'China can do without me; it cannot do without you.' On 16 May 1981, weeks before her death, she was admitted to the CCP and named honorary chairman of the PRC.

The second of the three Soong sisters of a wealthy Christian Shanghai family, she married Sun Yat-sen in 1915. Opposing Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup in 1927 she became the symbol of the Kuomintang left, went to Moscow, and in the 1930s led the China League for Civil Rights in Shanghai. During the war with Japan she organised the China Defence League in Hong Kong to supply the Communist base areas. In 1949 she became a vice-chair of the Central People’s Government; shortly before her death in 1981 she joined the Communist Party and was named honorary president. Her younger sister Soong Mei-ling was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.

Government and administration PRC state institutions 1898–1976 ○ Natural causes

The PRC's first premier and an architect of its foreign policy

His 1971 secret talks with Kissinger opened the way for Nixon's arrival in Beijing on 21 February 1972, and the Shanghai Communiqué of 28 February 1972 reordered the Cold War triangle.

A Chinese statesman born in Huai'an, Jiangsu in 1898 and died in Beijing in 1976. One of the CCP's earliest leaders, he joined a Chinese communist cell in Paris, served in the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, and acted as the Party's chief negotiator through the Xi'an Incident and the Chongqing negotiations. Appointed premier (of the Government Administration Council, later the State Council) with the founding of the PRC in October 1949, he served until his death in 1976, and concurrently as foreign minister from 1949 to 1958, becoming an architect of early PRC foreign policy. After the Zunyi Conference he was subordinate to Mao, and amid the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution he kept the state running and managed the balance of power.

Diplomacy and international organization PRC state institutions 1901–1972 ○ Natural causes

The poet-marshal who led the New Fourth Army and the Third Field Army and succeeded Zhou Enlai as foreign minister

Wounded and besieged on Meiling in the winter of 1936, Chen Yi wrote three poems as his dying words, hiding them in his clothes: "I go to the Springs to muster my old troops, a hundred thousand banners to behead the King of Hell."

From Sichuan, he joined the party after work-study in France and with Zhu De led the remnants of the Nanchang Uprising to Jinggangshan. He stayed behind on the Long March to fight three years of guerrilla war in the south and became acting commander of the New Fourth Army after the 1941 incident. In the civil war he commanded the East China (Third) Field Army at Huaihai and took Shanghai, becoming its first mayor. A marshal in 1955 and foreign minister from 1958, he ran China’s Bandung-era diplomacy in Asia and Africa. Attacked in the “February Countercurrent” of 1967, he died of cancer in 1972; Mao attended the funeral.

Economy, finance and planning PRC state institutions 1905–1954 ✕ Suicide under house arrest

The second-most powerful man in the CCP who wielded virtually autonomous power in Manchuria, then walked into Mao's trap and fell

'This medal should go to old pockmarked Gao Gang': Peng Dehuai, receiving the DPRK's highest award in Pyongyang, July 1953, crediting Gao's logistics and rear-base work

A CCP leader who rose from Shaanxi guerrilla bases to become the party, state and military boss of Manchuria (Dongbei), the PRC's most industrialized region, and a vice-chairman of the Central People's Government in 1949. During the Korean War, as commander and commissar of the Northeast Military Region, he organized the entire rear base and logistical network for the Chinese People's Volunteer Army; Peng Dehuai later said the medal he received 'should have gone to old pockmarked Gao Gang' for his home-front work. Summoned to Beijing in 1952 as chairman of the State Planning Commission to lead the First Five-Year Plan, he attempted to displace Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai from the Party hierarchy, a power play that Mao first encouraged then turned into the Gao-Rao Anti-Party Alliance purge. Placed under house arrest, he killed himself with sleeping pills in August 1954.

Economy, finance and planning PRC state institutions 1905–1995 ○ Natural causes

CCP elder who designed China's socialist economic system with his 'bird-cage economy' concept

'The cage is the plan, and within it the bird [the economy] is free to fly as it wishes.' — 1982, formalizing his core vision of the market-plan relationship

A core figure in both the first and second generations of CCP leadership, Chen Yun was the architect of China's socialist economic construction. Starting as a typesetter at the Shanghai Commercial Press, he immersed himself in the labor movement, and through the Long March and the Yan'an Rectification Movement became Mao Zedong's trusted advisor as head of the CCP Organization Department. After 1949, as chairman of the Central Finance and Economic Commission, he drafted the First Five-Year Plan, stabilized prices, and, following the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, led economic reconstruction alongside Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. In the 1980s he formalized the 'bird-cage economy' (the market must fly freely within the cage of the plan) and became the second-most powerful figure in China after Deng, a gravitational center for Party conservatives moderating the pace of reform.

Economy, finance and planning PRC state institutions 1908–2007 ○ Natural causes

First finance minister and central figure of the “61 renegades” case, who returned in the reform era as a conservative elder

Peng Dehuai and Zuo Quan named the operation the Hundred Regiments Offensive on 26 August 1940, but its launching was later revived as a charge against Peng in his line dispute with Mao.

From Shanxi, he was one of the 61 men who on party orders signed “recantations” to leave a Kuomintang prison in 1936, an episode revived in the Cultural Revolution as the “61 renegades” case that kept him confined for twelve years. As the first finance minister after 1949 he unified taxation and currency and was criticised by Mao in the 1953 “new tax system” affair. Returning in 1979 as vice-premier and vice-chairman of the Central Advisory Commission, he was one of the “eight elders” and chaired the meeting that removed Hu Yaobang in 1987. He died in 2007 at 98; Bo Xilai is his son.

Economy, finance and planning PRC state institutions 1909–1992 ○ Natural causes

The finance chief who survived the Cultural Revolution, helped arrest the Gang of Four and became president; one of the “eight elders”

An orthodox, Soviet-style communist and firm believer in central planning, he blocked marketization and enthusiastically advocated military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

A carpenter from Hubei, he was a political commissar of the Fourth Front Army and survived the destruction of the Western Route Army. He founded the New Fourth Army’s Fifth Division in Hubei during the war with Japan and led the breakout from the Central Plains at the start of the civil war. Finance minister for twenty-two years from 1954, he ran the economy and survived the Cultural Revolution at Zhou Enlai’s side. He joined the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 and, between Hua Guofeng’s “two whatevers” and Deng Xiaoping, argued with Chen Yun for the primacy of planning. President from 1983 to 1988, he backed the crackdown of 1989.

Government and administration PRC state institutions 1913–2002 ↓ Removed 1962 · natural causes

A founder of the northern Shaanxi base, purged for sixteen years, who opened Guangdong’s special economic zones

He built the Shaanxi–Gansu base with Liu Zhidan that became the Long March's destination, was purged in 1962 and confined for sixteen years, then opened the special economic zones as Guangdong's first secretary in 1978.

From Shaanxi, he founded the Shaanxi–Gansu base with Liu Zhidan, the destination of the Long March. After 1949 he headed the Northwest Bureau and served as State Council secretary-general and vice-premier, but in 1962 Kang Sheng denounced the novel Liu Zhidan as an “anti-party” defence of Gao Gang and Xi was purged, spending sixteen years in confinement and rural exile. Returning as Guangdong first secretary in 1978, he asked the centre for the power to “take one step ahead” to stem the flight to Hong Kong, which led to the Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou special economic zones in 1980. A Secretariat member in the 1980s, he supported Hu Yaobang and opposed his removal in 1987. He was Xi Jinping’s father.

Government and administration PRC state institutions 1915–1986 ↓ Left office 1980 · lung cancer

The peasant leader of the model village behind “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai”, who rose to vice-premier

The symbol of Mao-era self-reliance: after Mao's 1964 “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai” his brigade became the national model, and he rose to the Politburo and vice-premiership before the reforms sidelined him in 1980.

A barely literate peasant from Dazhai in Xiyang County, Shanxi, he terraced hillsides as brigade secretary and rebuilt the village after the 1963 floods without state aid. When Mao said in 1964 “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai” the village became the national model, and Chen became a Central Committee member in 1969, a Politburo member in 1973 and vice-premier for agriculture in 1975. The Dazhai model preached collective labour and self-reliance, but inflated statistics and coercion came to light; after the reforms began he left the vice-premiership in 1980, lived on a farm outside Beijing and died of lung cancer.

Government and administration PRC state institutions 1916–2015 ○ Natural causes

“If you want rice, look for Wan Li” — the reform pioneer who let Anhui’s peasants contract land to households

“If you want to eat rice, look for Wan Li”: the reformist leader who first implemented the household-responsibility system in Anhui, then served as First Vice Premier (1983–1988) and NPC Standing Committee Chairman (1988–1993).

From Shandong, he was vice-mayor of Beijing after 1949, directing the “ten great buildings” including the Great Hall of the People, and was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Appointed Anhui first secretary in 1977, he tolerated the secret land division at Xiaogang village and with the provincial “six articles” allowed household contracting in the famine-stricken countryside, the starting point of rural reform. As vice-premier for agriculture from 1980 he dismantled the people’s communes, and he chaired the National People’s Congress Standing Committee from 1988 to 1993. Returning from abroad in May 1989, he endorsed martial law. He died in 2015 at 99.

Government and administration PRC state institutions 1928–2019 ○ Natural causes

The premier who declared martial law in May 1989, called “the butcher of Beijing”; Zhou Enlai’s ward

An engineer who became premier in 1987, declared martial law in Beijing on 20 May 1989, and was the government official held responsible for the military crackdown of 3-4 June.

From Sichuan, he was raised under the protection of Zhou Enlai and his wife after the Nationalists executed his father in 1931. Trained in hydroelectric engineering at the Moscow Power Institute, he rose through the electricity ministry and succeeded Zhao Ziyang as premier in 1987. After the televised dialogue with student representatives collapsed on 18 May 1989 he declared martial law in Beijing on 20 May and was the government’s responsible official for the crackdown of 4 June. As premier he pushed through the Three Gorges Dam, and he chaired the National People’s Congress Standing Committee from 1998 to 2003. He died in 2019.