Yu Huiyong

Yu Huiyong (Chinese: 于会泳; pinyin: Yú Huìyǒng; Wade–Giles: Yu Hui-yung) (1925–1977) was a Chinese artist and politician of the Communist Party of China and the People's Republic of China.

Yu Huiyong was born in Shandong Province in 1925. He was greatly interested in music and learned to play a big number of instruments. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, he joined a communist performance group, and in 1949 went to teach at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (while simultaneously studiying popular music), helping at turning a Western-oriented institution into a training ground for the communist art of People's China. In the meantime, he joined the Communist Party of China. He graduated in 1950 but continued to work in the field of music.

In the same year, Yu Huiyong was transferred to the Research Institute on Ethnic Music, where he wrote many essays on music styles in China's provinces and took part in creating orchestral performances. In later years, he continued teaching and writing, publishing a comprehensive essay on China's folk music in 1959. In 1962 he was promoted to lecturer at the Shanghai Conservatory, and deputy director of its musical theory department the following year. In 1965 he was appointed member of the Drama Reform and Creative Group, and worked on musical embellishment of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, one of the "eight model revolutionary theatrical works" re-elaborated by Jiang Qing.

In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, Yu Huiyong and many of the Shanghai Conservatory staff were targeted as bourgeois intellectuals and forced to resign, submit to self-criticism and criticism by students, and do physical labor. Yu Huiyong however took active part at the movement: he was called to Beijing to stage the "eight model revolutionary theatrical works", then returned to Shanghai where he joined the "rebel faction". In 1967 he was appointed vice-chairman of the Shanghai Conservatory Revolutionary Committee, chairman of the preparatory committee for the Shanghai Cultural Revolutionary Committee, and put in charge of the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre. He worked directly under Zhang Chunqiao, one of the Gang of Four.

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