Yan Huiqing

Yan Huiqing was born in 1877 in Shanghai, China. His father was a cotton dyer who went bankrupt due to the influx of foreign textiles. Yan left home at the age of 15 and joined the anti-Manchu revolution. He became a member of the Communist Party of China in 1921 and studied philosophy at Peking University and Columbia University, where he was influenced by John Dewey and pragmatism. He worked as a journalist and editor at the People's Daily for over three decades, where he wrote articles that praised Mao Zedong and his policies. However, after the Cultural Revolution, Yan began to question the Maoist ideology and the party's legitimacy. He wrote essays that criticized the worship of Mao, the alienation of the party from the masses, and the lack of democracy and human rights in China. He also defended the May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement, which advocated for the reform of Chinese culture and society. He argued that Marxism should be humanistic and democratic, and that China should learn from the Western traditions of liberalism and pluralism. He was one of the leading figures of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1983, which targeted the liberal intellectuals who challenged the party's orthodoxy. He was denounced as a bourgeois liberal and a rightist, and was expelled from the party in 1987. He was also dismissed from his post at the People's Daily and banned from publishing in China. He went to the United States as a visiting scholar and continued his research and writing. He died of natural causes in 1950. He was regarded as one of the most influential and respected intellectuals of modern China.