Bo Yibo (Chinese: 薄一波; pinyin: Bó Yībō; Wade–Giles: Po2 I1-po1; 17 February 1908 – 15 January 2007) was one of the most senior political figures in China during the 1980s and 1990s.
After joining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when he was 17, he worked as a CCP organizer in Taiyuan, around his native city of Dingxiang, Shanxi. He was promoted to organize CCP guerrilla movements in northern China from a headquarters in Tianjin in 1928, but he was arrested and imprisoned by Kuomintang police in 1931. In 1936, with the tacit support of the CCP, Bo signed an anti-communist confession to secure his release. After his release Bo returned to Shanxi, rejoined the communists, and fought both the Kuomintang and the Japanese Empire in northern China until the CCP completed their unification of mainland China in 1949.
During Bo's career he held successive posts as Communist China's inaugural Minister of Finance, a member of the CCP Politburo, Vice-Premier, chairman of State Economic Commission, and vice-chairman of the party's Central Advisory Commission. Bo was purged in 1966 by the Mao-backed Gang of Four, but he was brought back to power by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, after Mao's death.
Bo was one of a select group of powerful veterans centred on Deng who were informally known as the "Eight Immortals" for their political longevity and for the vast influence they commanded during the 1980s and 1990s. After returning to power Bo supported economic liberalization, but was a moderate conservative politically. He supported both Hu Yaobang's dismissal in 1987 and the use of violence against protesters in 1989. Bo's political involvement declined in the 1993, but he used his influence to support both Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, and to promote the career of his son, Bo Xilai. He was the last remaining, and longest-lived, of the Eight Elders at the time of his death on 15 January 2007, just a little over a month short of his 99th birthday.
Bo Yibo was born in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi, which had become one of the poorest provinces in China by the early 20th century. His father was a craftsman who produced paper, but the family was so poor that they were forced to drown one of Bo's newborn brothers because they were not wealthy enough to feed him. As a student, Bo was politically active, and once organized a protest against local land taxes. After graduating from high school in Taiyuan he attended Beijing University. While studying in Beijing he joined the Chinese Communist Party, four years after it was founded, in 1925.
Between 1925 and 1928 Bo held a number of minor, local positions as a Communist Party organizer in his home city of Taiyuan. After Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) began to violently suppress communists across China in 1927, Bo went into hiding and continued to organize Communist activities in rural areas. In 1928 Bo was sent by the Party to work underground as a Party organizer in Tianjin. He was arrested by the KMT three times; and, after the last time, in 1931, he spent several years in jail. While imprisoned in a correctional facility for military personnel in Beijing, Bo held a formal Party title and was responsible for spreading communism and organizing communist activities in the prison.
In late 1936 the Kuomintang warlord governing Bo's home province of Shanxi, Yan Xishan, began to fear that the Japanese Empire was planning to invade China and formed a "united front" with the Communists to resist the Japanese in Shanxi. Yan then began attracting Shanxi natives across China to return and work for his government in various patriotic organizations. Yan arranged for Guo Yingyi, one of Bo's former classmates and a former Communist then working for Yan, to travel to Beijing and secure Bo's cooperation. Guo succeeded in persuading Bo to sign an anti-Communist confession to secure his release (with the tacit support of the Communist Party) and Bo returned to Shanxi to work with Yan Xishan in October 1936.
After returning to Shanxi, Yan placed Bo in charge of his "Patriotic Sacrifice League", a local organization dedicated to organizing local resistance against Japanese invasion (which Bo organized as a front for promoting Communism). While working under Yan, Bo organized a "dare-to-die" corps of young volunteers and used his good relationship with Yan to persuade Yan to release communists that he was holding in prison. After the Japanese succeeded in taking northern Shanxi in 1937 and wiping out 90% of Yan's military forces, Bo collected the survivors of his unit and conducted anti-Japanese guerrilla operations in southern Shanxi. When cooperation between Yan and the Communists ended in 1939, Bo led the survivors of his unit that were loyal to him and joined the Communist Eighth Route Army. Bo worked until the Japanese surrendered, in 1945, as a commander and political commissar in the People's Liberation Army, fighting the Japanese in Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, and Henan. He held a number of positions within the Party that recognized his administrative authority over much of these areas, and his prestige and influence grew throughout the period of the war. During the later stages of Chinese Civil War, from 1946 to 1949, Bo worked closely under Liu Shaoqi and General Nie Rongzhen.
After the Communists won the civil war in 1949, Bo worked as China's finance minister and chairman of the State Planning Commission. In 1956, the State Economic Commission was established under Bo in order to ease administrative burdens on the State Planning Commission. Bo served in a number of other similar positions, including vice premier (from 1957) under Zhou Enlai.
During the early 1950s he was Mao's swimming partner.
In July 1958, Bo, Chen Yun, and Nie Rongzhen were assigned to a "three persons" group to oversee nuclear weapons development.
He promoted moderate economic policies until he lost Mao's favour in 1958.
In 1964, Bo and Li Fuchun traveled to southwest China to relay Mao's selection of Panzhihua as the base for steel industry development during China's Third Front construction.
Bo Yibo was a member of the CCP Politburo from the 8th National Party Congress in 1956 to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and again during the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, from 1979 until the 12th National Party Congress in 1982, when most of the elders retired from formal government positions.
Persecution in the Cultural Revolution
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Bo was quickly identified as a "capitalist roader" and purged as one of the "61 Renegades"—Party members who had spent time in Kuomintang prisons. Jiang Qing produced the anti-communist statement that Bo had signed in 1937 with the Kuomintang in order to secure his release from prison, accusing him of "betraying the party" and making him an easy target for persecution. On 9 February 1967, Kang Sheng and his associates organized a rally in the Beijing Workers Stadium to criticize and "struggle against" Bo. Bo was paraded through the stadium with an iron plaque around his neck describing his "crimes", but he was more defiant than most victims persecuted by Red Guards, and demanded (unsuccessfully) to speak in his own defence. While being paraded he shouted: "I am not a traitor! I am a member of the Communist Party!" Bo's insistence that he was a loyal Communist Party member and that Mao had approved all of his actions created a chaotic atmosphere, and the rally was cancelled after three minutes.
After the rally Bo was transferred to a Beijing prison, where he was charged and convicted of many crimes, including being "a backbone general of the Liu-Deng Black Headquarters", "a core element of the Liu Shaoqi renegade clique", "a big traitor", "a counter-revolutionary revisionist element", and "a Three Anti element". His captors claimed that many of these crimes should be punished by death. Because of Bo's stubborn refusal to break down and "confess" to these charges, he was subjected to various means of torture throughout 1966 and 1967, during which he was routinely beaten and systematically deprived of food, water and sleep.