Huang Yanpei's life can be described as a legendary life, he was admitted to the former Qing Dynasty with his own skills, and later became an industrialist, and he devoted himself to education for a long time, and Chiang Kai-shek's two sons were once his students.
Huang Yanpei has a criterion of "not being an official" for people, which is resolute not to be broken, and the Beiyang government appointed him as the government's chief of education. Chiang Kai-shek arranged for him to serve in the government, but he also refused.
However, as a well-known detractor of the Communist Party of China, he personally established the Democratic League and the China Democratic Construction Association among the eight democratic parties in China, and also served as the first chairman of the central committees of the two parties. After a difficult life of arrest, escape, and wanted, Huang Yanpei eventually became the vice premier of the post-founding Government Council.
Then, why did Huang Yanpei, who aspired not to become an official, become vice premier of the State Council after the founding of the People's Republic of China? Chiang Kai-shek once asked him to go out of the mountains and was refused, so who invited him out of the mountains after the founding of the People's Republic of China?
Huang Yanpei
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="14" > family road to develop education</h1>
In 1878, Huang Yanpei was born in a family of scholars in Pudong, Shanghai, and Huang Yanpei, who fell from a small family road, experienced the grief of losing his mother at the age of 13 and his father at the age of 17. This also made Huang Yanpei, who was a young man, study harder.
During those difficult days, Huang Yanpei worked and studied at the same time, and he used the money he bought to write articles at night to support himself and his two younger sisters. Since he was a child, he was influenced by the family's humanistic environment, and his cultural foundation was also very deep, and in the material life of poverty at that time, Huang Yanpei developed the excellent qualities of perseverance and hard-working.
In 1899, Huang Yanpei won the first place in Songjiang Province, and later in 1902, he won the Jiangnan Township Examination and became the glory of the family.
Huang Yanpei, who has witnessed the shattering of the country's mountains and rivers since he was a child, undoubtedly does not feel the country's difficulties in his heart, and he is full of patriotic enthusiasm, and he has long had the desire to save the country.
For a long time, he has been exploring a way to save the country, first by contacting new books such as Yan Fu's translated "TheOry of Heavenly Speech", and later opening a school in his hometown.
However, because he had been advocating anti-Qing, he was arrested by the Qing government, imprisoned for a time, and sentenced to death. Later, with the help of a foreign priest, Huang Yanpei was rescued from prison and fled to Japan in a hurry.
Young Huang Yanpei
In 1911, Huang Yanpei participated in the Xinhai Revolution, and Huang Yanpei, who threw himself into revolutionary activities, more deeply understood this society, and he knew that if he wanted to get rid of social ills, the most fundamental thing was to start from the foundation; and the foundation of society was education, and if he wanted education to develop, he had to run schools, he had to teach and educate people, so that the next generation would become stronger and more powerful.
In 1916, the Pudong Middle School founded by Huang Yanpei was the most famous, and even with the Nankai Middle School in the north at that time, it won the reputation of "North and South, South Pudong". Under this reputation, many people have come to visit, and Chiang Kai-shek is no exception. He sent his eldest son Chiang Ching-kuo to Pudong Middle School to study, and Chiang Ching-kuo, who had achieved success in his studies, made Chiang Kai-shek very pleased.
Chiang Kai-shek, who trusted Huang Yanpei very much, later sent his second son Jiang Weiguo to Pudong Middle School to study, and worshiped Huang Yanpei as a teacher, in the Xikou Jiang family, and still preserves Chiang Ching-kuo's writings in Pudong Middle School.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="27" > to start vocational education and was reluctant to become an official</h1>
In the 1920s, Huang Yanpei was already famous throughout the country, and in order to realize the country's desire to revitalize and become rich, he began to investigate the country's education issues.
As a reporter for the Declaration, he personally went to various regions of the seven provinces of the country and conducted a five-month educational inspection. After the inspection period, Huang Yanpei was very disappointed in his heart, because he saw that what the students had learned was useless, the state of "graduation is equal to unemployment", and the future of China today is all about these students.
Later, Huang Yanpei started from China's actual needs and led the team to personally go to Japan, the United States and other places for in-depth investigation, he saw that these countries due to the rise of vocational education, even the national economy has taken off with it. Inspired by Huang Yanpei, in 1917, he united many well-known figures in the education and practical circles to establish the China Vocational Education Society in Shanghai.
One of the major propositions of the China Vocational Education Society is to "make the unemployed have a job and make the unemployed happy." In the school founded by Huang Yanpei, many well-known people have come to study. For example, Zhang Wentian, who was the general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, Hua Luogeng, a mathematician, and Wang Ganchang, the father of the neutron bomb, and even Vietnam's President Ho Chi Minh, who listened to Huang Yanpei's lectures and benefited greatly when he was young, and later called Huang Yanpei "my teacher".
In the following decades of educational undertakings and social activities, Huang Yanpei was mainly carried out through the China Vocational Education Society, and his outstanding achievements in education and active activities on the social stage made Huang Yanpei receive many official invitations.
The Beiyang government has twice sent a telegram to appoint Huang Yanpei as minister of education, but he has insisted on resigning. Not only that, Chiang Kai-shek also admired Huang Yanpei very much because his two sons had worshiped Cai Huangyanpei as a teacher and studied in his school, so Chiang Kai-shek wanted to arrange for Huang Yanpei to serve in the Kuomintang government, but Huang Yanpei resolutely said that he did not want to enter politics.
When Chiang Kai-shek saw that Huang Yanpei was not moved, he retreated to the second place and wanted to invite Huang Yanpei to move to Nanjing, so that he could consult Huang Yanpei from time to time in the nearest place. However, Huang Yanpei still insisted on his "not being an official" and shirked it on the grounds that he wanted to investigate Japan and North Korea.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="36" > acquaintance with Mao Zedong</h1>
The acquaintance between Huang Yanpei and Mao Zedong was actually mainly due to a speech event in Shanghai. In 1920, Huang Yanpei, who was committed to the cause of education, in order to better develop the cause of education in China and make the thinking of more young students more advanced, he specially invited the American philosopher Dewey to personally come to Shanghai to hold a profound lecture.
As soon as the announcement of this news was issued, many young students came to listen to the lecture, and Mao Zedong was also a member of the audience, in which Dewey advocated pragmatism, while Huang advocated pragmatic education. In terms of educational philosophy, the two have many coincidences.
In this speech, Huang Yanpei also vigorously attacked the problems existing in traditional education, and explained on a reasonable basis the specific number of people who go to school and the specific number of unemployed among every hundred middle school graduates. The results of this comparison already show that traditional education is incompatible with the development of society.
Huang Yanpei's speech left a deep impression on Mao Zedong, who was only 27 years old at the time. More than twenty years later, in 1945, when Huang Yanpei visited Yan'an, Mao Zedong personally came to Yan'an Airport to greet him. And Mao Zedong, who had not seen Huang Yanpei for many years, remembered the exciting scene of listening to Huang Yanpei's speech when he was young, and held Huang Yanpei's hand tightly and said: "We have not seen each other for more than twenty years."
It was only then that Huang Yanpei learned that the great leader of the Communist Party of China had come to listen to his speech as early as 1921.
After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Huang Yanpei had been busy with important state affairs, and he had frequent exchanges between Shanghai and Nanjing, with about 9 trips in three months.
However, because the traffic conditions at that time were not particularly developed, there was a long free time on the road, during which Huang Yanpei also carried out reading activities. Coincidentally, he read Snow's "Journey to the West" and Mao Zedong's dictated "Autobiography of Mao Zedong" to Snow, so in the book, Huang Yanpei already had a more detailed understanding of the various deeds of the CCP leader.
Huang Yanpei also learned that Mao Zedong also grew up in the countryside and grew up in a very poor family. Although the academic qualifications of both people are very similar, they are not particularly high. But in terms of their qualifications, both of them have sufficient experience, and both belong to the empirical political practitioners.
Both are good at operation, but there is no shortage of writings. Therefore, at that time, Huang Yanpei had already felt a very strong attraction from this CCP leader who had never met before.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="48" > formal ties to the Chinese Communist Party</h1>
At the beginning of the founding of the Communist Party of China, Huang Yanpei already had some contacts with Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao and others. Before the founding of the Communist Party of China, Chen Duxiu often went to the China Vocational Education Society to visit Huang Yanpei and talk with him.
Later, Huang Yanpei heard that the CCP was about to be established, and under the friendly advice of his friend Shen Suwen, he specifically contacted Li Dazhao and personally went to Beijing to pay a visit. In the course of their mutual conversations, both sides felt very harmonious, and when it came to the current domestic situation and what kind of measures the two sides should adopt in response to the situation, they agreed to cooperate closely in future exchanges.
In the time that followed, the first official contact with Huang Yanpei on behalf of the CPC Central Committee was Mao Zedong's teacher and one of Huang Yanpei's students, Xu Teli. Xu Teli once studied for a while in a training center run by the Jiangsu Provincial Education Federation, which Huang Yanpei presided over. Xu Teli was in 1938, to Wuhan to visit Huang Yanpei, but at that time Xu Teli came at the wrong time, Huang Yanpei was not at home. Therefore, Xu Teli had to leave a note and meet Huang Yanpei for the second time.
Soon after, Xu Teli paid a second visit to Huang Yanpei, and during this exchange, the two sides saw each other as usual and had a very speculative conversation, and this visit also laid the foundation for cooperation between Huang Yanpei and the Chinese Communists.
Subsequently, Huang Yanpei's understanding of the Communist Party became deeper and deeper.
In 1938, the heavy artillery fire of the War of Resistance broke out in Wuhan, and it was also at the beginning of the second Kuomintang cooperation. Zhou Enlai and Dong Biwu and others also joined the National Political Participation Association on behalf of the Communist Party, and Yan Pei, as a sage in society, was also hired as a national suffragette. From this moment on, Huang Yanpei also carried out a high degree of cooperation with communist party personnel and promoted the process of anti-Japanese resistance.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="56" > worked hard to propagate the CCP's political ideas</h1>
From October 1939 onwards, relations between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party gradually entered a very tense state, and in view of this situation, the heads of the various parties often worked together to study the situation.
Huang Yanpei also put forward his own opinions in the process of participating, hoping to invite people from all parties other than the Kuomintang and the Communist Party to jointly issue a letter to compatriots in the whole country at an appropriate time. Huang Yanpei urged people from all parties to cooperate wholeheartedly, and if there are any different opinions between the two sides, they can be resolved in legal practice.
A year later, instead of easing the situation, relations between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party became more tense, and the heads of the parties at that time believed that there must be no way out of the overall situation of non-democratic unity, and that there would be no reason to strive for democratic unity if the organization of centrists was not tightened.
On June 14, 1940, Huang Yanpei, faced with the tension between the Kuomintang and the Communists, made some suggestions to Zhou Enlai. For the sake of the people's future, he hoped that the CCP would grow together without conflicting with the mutual interests of the Kuomintang and without derogation of sympathy for the people. Moreover, both sides should use their full strength to fight against the same enemy and make great contributions to the future of the country and the nation.
In 1941, before and after the Anhui Incident, Huang Yanpei held several friendly meetings with Chiang Kai-shek and Zhou Enlai over the refusal of the CCP suffragettes to attend the political meetings. Huang Yanpei has been doing his best to try to organize a special committee in the political participation meeting to solve this matter.
During this period of the Common War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and in the practice of striving for democracy, Huang Yanpei also gradually realized a series of policies of the Communist Party of China, and also developed a desire to personally rush to Yan'an to investigate this place. Later, after many discussions, Huang Yanpei and others secretly established the China Democratic Political League League in Chongqing, and everyone publicly recommended Huang Yanpei as the chairman of the Central Standing Committee.
From the late stage of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, in order to reconcile the relations between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, Huang Yanpei launched a democratic constitutional movement, which became a major part of Huang Yanpei's political activities.
1945, Yan'an Airport
In 1940, Zhou Enlai specially arrived in Chongqing from Yan'an for a long stay. Soon after, at a weekly forum organized by the China Vocational Education Society founded by Huang Yanpei, he also specially invited Zhou Enlai to give a speech.
There were thousands of people present, all standing on the large playground of Bashu Middle School, which also caused a very enthusiastic reaction at the time and caused a sensation in the mountain city. Huang Yanpei also made a public appearance, actively publicizing the CCP's political views.
Later, Huang Yanpei also received a letter from Chen Lifu, in which Chen Lifu interrogated Huang Yanpei. Huang Yanpei replied very frankly that this forum is open to all places, and if you want to, you can try it. Chen Lifu saw that Huang Yanpei was determined and had no choice but to give up.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="69" > a major turning point in his life: a trip to Yan'an</h1>
In the summer of 1945, Wang Ruofei, who assisted Zhou Enlai in his work in Yan'an, personally visited Huang Yanpei and sent him relevant documents on the just-concluded Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China. At that time, the relations between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were in a stalemate, and in order to resume the stalled Peace Talks between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, Huang Yanpei conveyed his ideas to the CCP organization through Wang Ruofei, and thus facilitated the trip to Yan'an.
Huang Yanpei and five other political participants embarked on the journey to Xi'an, and when they arrived at Yan'an Airport, Huang Yanpei saw Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Dong Biwu and many other CPC leaders and warmly welcomed them at the airport. Not only that, but many of Huang Yanpei's former students also came to the airport to greet them, which made Huang Yanpei very happy that his students are now small achievements.
Later, under the arrangements organized by the CPC, Huang Yanpei witnessed the brand-new atmosphere of this liberated area and the high spirit of the military and the people in Yan'an. Here, Huang Yanpei feels that there is no limit, and he can also enjoy free visits, which is very different from the state in which Huang Yanpei was once supervised everywhere in Chongqing and felt unfree everywhere.
In the Yan'an area, huang Yanpei saw a new atmosphere that was completely different from the Kuomintang area, where the people were very positive and sunny, everyone's face showed a rosy luster, and there would be opinion boxes everywhere on the street, and people could submit books and submit their proposals directly to Mao Zedong in this democratic form.
Later, Huang Yanpei also had a knee-jerking conversation with Mao Zedong for more than a dozen hours, which impressed Huang Yanpei and rekindled a glimmer of hope for new China in his heart.
This trip to Yan'an, for Huang Yanpei, is also the most significant turning point in his life, which also makes Huang Yanpei return to Chongqing have a significant difference from before.
Huang Yanpei, who returned to Chongqing, recorded the conversation between himself and Mao Zedong by his wife Yao Weijun, and wrote it in one go, "The Return of Yan'an", which was snapped up in the Guotong district and everyone would use it to recite.
At the beginning of 1948, with the victory of the Liberation War, people from all walks of life received invitations from the Communist Party of China to participate in the call of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and Huang Yanpei was no exception. Chiang Kai-shek, who learned of this, was very angry, and he sent a military command station agent to Huang Yanpei's side, closely monitored him, and immediately arrested Huang Yanpei as soon as he made any changes.
Once, during a meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, agents suddenly broke into Huang Yanpei's home in Chongqing, and Huang Yanpei's wife, Yao Weijun, was still eight months pregnant.
In 1949, Huang Yanpei's second son, Huang Jingwu, in order to cover Huang Yanpei's trip to Beiping to attend a conference, was unfortunately arrested by secret agents. At that time, when this news was learned by Mao Zedong, he was very shocked, and he immediately ordered Zhou Enlai, Li Kenong and others to spend a lot of money to rescue Huang Jingwu at all costs, but they did not succeed.
Later, Huang Jingwuning died and did not give up any secrets, he was broken by Kuomintang agents alive, and finally buried alive. Huang Yanpei's heart was heartbroken, and Mao Zedong also sent Zhou Enlai to comfort him after hearing the news.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="83" > accepted the heavy responsibility and became the vice premier of the Council of State</h1>
Later, after arriving in Beijing, Huang Yanpei met with Chairman Mao, and Huang Yanpei was the first guest to come to the Xiangshan Shuangqing Villa where Chairman Mao was staying.
On the same day, Mao Zedong and Huang Yanpei talked for a long time, and this time the content of the conversation involved the strategy of the founding of the country. For this major event, Mao Zedong confided to Huang Yanpei a number of important major policies, including the question of the prospects of the country envisaged by Mao Zedong.
It was precisely because of Huang Yanpei's prestige among national industrialists that Mao Zedong pinned his hopes on Huang Yanpei, hoping that he would be able to take on the task of organizing industrialists after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and even more hoping that Huang Yanpei could play an "intermediary" role in conveying and explaining the policies of the Communist Party to the industrialists. Huang Yanpei was also obligated to accept this heavy responsibility arranged by Mao Zedong and the new role he entrusted.
This shuangqing villa talk was another important exchange of ideas between Huang Yanpei and Mao Zedong after the Yan'an talk. Moreover, after this conversation, huang Yanpei's role in the country's political life after the founding of New China was also laid.
In the early days of the founding of New China, Huang Yanpei felt deep admiration for all the merits of Mao Zedong in state affairs. Huang Yanpei, who grew up lonely and experienced a difficult growth, also saw the great selfless spirit of the communists and saw all the efforts made by the communists to the poor people. Huang Yanpei was deeply moved, so in this long exchange, he adhered to the concept of social justice and sincerely accepted the leadership of the party.
Later, Premier Zhou Enlai personally went out and came to Huang Yanpei's home twice and carried out sincere mobilization. In the end, Huang Yanpei, at the warm invitation of Premier Zhou, finally broke his old rule of not being an official and agreed to serve as one of the four vice premiers of the Council of State and take charge of light industry.
In March 1960, Zhou Enlai and Huang Yanpei had a cordial conversation at the Second Session of the Third National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
The following year, the Central Committee decided to set up a Central Financial and Economic Commission with Chen Yun as its director, and prepared to arrange for Huang Yanpei and Bo Yibo to serve together as the two deputy directors of the Central Finance Commission. However, Huang Yanpei considered that he was old and had several positions at this advanced age, so he once again recommended his old friend, Ma Yinchu, president of Peking University, to replace him as deputy director, while Huang Yanpei only accepted the position of member of the Central Finance Commission.