Page "Chen Yun" Paragraph 11

Although Chen nominally retained his positions as Party vice chairman and member of the Politburo, he was no longer in practice part of the core Party leadership.

He did, however, continue to express his opinions behind the scenes.

In 1961 he conducted investigations of the rural areas around Shanghai.

According to a Cultural Revolution attack on him by the radical group within the finance system, he reported the peasants as saying: " In the days of Chiang Kai-shek we had rice to eat.

In the glorious era of Chairman Mao, we have only gruel.

" According to his obituary, Chen was one of the main designers of the economic policies of the 1961-1962 " capitalist road " era, when China's economic policy stressed material incentives and sought to encourage economic growth in preference to pursuing ideological goals.

This approach is often referred to as Chen's " bird-cage " theory of post-Great Leap economic recovery, where the bird represents the free market and the cage represents a central plan.

Chen proposed that a balance should be found between " setting the bird free " and choking the bird with a central plan that was too restrictive ; this theory would later become a focal point of criticism against Chen during the Cultural Revolution.

His only public appearance during this time was a photograph of him published on the front page of the People's Daily and other major newspapers on May 1, 1962, showing a somewhat emaciated Chen shaking hands with Chairman Mao, while Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Deng Xiaoping ( the entire inner core of leadership of that time, with the exception of Lin Biao ) look on.

There was no caption or any other explanation.