Only seek truth: Tracking the Past of General Yan Hongyan: Tracking the Past of General Yan Hongyan

Author: Li Yuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-05-01
Features: Regarding General Yan Hongyan, I only knew that he was persecuted to death in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, and I know nothing else about him. After reading Li Yuan's book "Only Seeking Truth — Tracing the Life of General Yan Hongyan," I couldn't help but respect him deeply. On the battlefield filled with smoke and gunfire, defeating real enemies required fearlessness of bloodshed and bravery in battle. It also demanded upholding truth and adhering to the principle of seeking truth from facts. Yan Hongyan left his mark on the battlefield in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region, the Jin-Xi-Jiang-Yu Theater, the Big Bend, and the Huaihai Campaign, where his glorious military achievements were recorded in history. In the face of armed enemies, he was truly a hero. After the liberation, Yan Hongyan led the campaign in the Southwest, holding high positions and great power, yet he still remained committed to the principle of seeking truth from facts, which was truly rare. During difficult times, when he saw people starving to death from edema in the grassroots level, neither the secretary of the prefectural committee nor the secretary of the county committee dared to tell him the truth. He angrily told them, "Communists are not afraid of death, so why are you afraid of speaking the truth or losing your official position? Are you afraid of being dismissed? What kind of Communist are you! You should be dismissed and expelled from the Party!" Like he did on the battlefield, he issued a stern order: "We must immediately investigate the situation and take measures to stop the deaths from edema!" After returning to Kunming from the grassroots level, Yan Hongyan acted swiftly and decisively, immediately convening a meeting of the standing committee and deciding to make stopping the deaths from edema the top priority. If during the Great Leap Forward period, Yan Hongyan dared to resist the "five winds" and neither followed orders blindly nor relied on books, then during the Cultural Revolution, when Lin Biao's fallacy that "one cannot achieve great things without lying" was in vogue, speaking the truth and adhering to the principle of seeking truth from facts was even more difficult. Yet Yan Hongyan remained steadfast in his original intention. His sharp confrontation with the likes of Chen Boda is a prime example. On January 8, 1967, Chen Boda, the "Head of the Central Cultural Revolution Group," called Yan Hongyan from Beijing in a scolding tone, saying, "Don't be timid, don't live in luxury, and don't be afraid of hardship!" Yan Hongyan was deeply annoyed and angrily told Chen, "This is how the Cultural Revolution is being conducted—do you enjoy it? Sitting in Beijing, you only issue arbitrary orders, do you understand the situation below? What do you think about the economic construction of Yunnan? What about the frontier regions? What are you really trying to do? I don't recognize you as representing the Central Committee," and he hung up the phone. Yan Hongyan's experiences have long become history, and his has long been rectified and cleared. But we should recognize that at this time when we are comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society, advocating for speaking the truth and adhering to the principle of seeking truth from facts is more urgently needed than ever. The focus of this book is to promote the ideological and political qualities of seeking truth from facts as a revolutionary figure throughout Yan Hongyan's life. Through the concrete practices of this revolutionary figure, it elucidates a philosophy with immense vitality, vividly reflecting the sharp opposition and intense struggle between dialectical materialism and subjective idealism and metaphysics.