Yu Qiuli

Yu Qiuli (Chinese: 余秋里; pinyin: Yú Qiūlǐ; 15 November 1914 – 3 February 1999) was vice prime minister of China from 1975 until 1982 and was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China. He was also a lieutenant general of the People's Liberation Army, and served as Deputy Secretary-General of China's Central Military Commission and Director of the PLA General Political Department from 1982 to 1987.

Yu Qiuli was one of the last of the Long March generation of Chinese leaders who survived the epic journey by Communist forces across China in the mid-1930s to become an important figure in the administrations of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Yu was a soldier-bureaucrat who founded China's modern oil industry and helped Deng modernise his army.

By the time of his death, Yu had ceased to be one of the central figures in Chinese policy-making for more than a decade. But he had continued, like other former leaders of his generation, to keep up to date with state affairs by carrying out frequent inspection tours around the country. He was particularly involved in efforts to promote the economies of the former base areas of the Communist guerrilla armies, many of which are still mired in poverty.

Yu's background was typical of a Communist guerrilla commander who turned to be a national leader. He was born in 1914, three years after the collapse of China's last imperial dynasty, into a poor peasant family. By the age of 14 he had taken part in a peasant uprising. At 16 he joined the Communist Party. Yu was among the tens of thousands of guerrillas and their supporters who from 1934 joined the Long March in an effort to break through the Kuomintang blockades around the Communist base in the south. In 1936, he was injured in the arm during a skirmish with pursuing nationalist forces. He continued on the journey north over treacherous terrain. Nine months later, after he had completed a journey of thousands of miles in terrible pain, his arm was amputated. "I am a man who has gone through nine deaths," Yu told the American journalist Harrison Salisbury in 1984. During the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and the subsequent Chinese Civil War, Yu was a leading political commissar and training officer in the Communist forces.

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