People of the Revolution and the USSR

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 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.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 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.