The Yu (郁) family, with kinship ties to powerful government officials, intellectuals, and businessmen of the Qing Dynasty across China including the "red-topped hat" merchant Hu Xueyan, prospered from maritime trade and banking in the mid-19th century, reaching its zenith during the Daoguang reign.

[5] He emerged as a prominent student leader in the December 9th movement (1935) and organized the National Liberation Pioneers (Minxian: 民先) to broaden the anti-Japanese alliance.

Many of its early advocates and participants went on to become revolutionary leaders and public officials of the People's Republic of China, including Huang Jing, Yao Yilin, Xiong Xianghui, and Xu Jiatun.

After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Yu organised students movements in Kuomintang-controlled areas in Baoding, Shijiazhuang, Taiyuan, Wuhan, western Hebei, Changsha, Nanchang, and northern Guangdong.

A trained physicist, Yu took extensive field trips to Mizhi and Suide counties, and published a book on land and agriculture in northern Shaanxi (republished in 1979).

[7] He was for a while the Director of the Yan'an Library (延安圖書館), and was involved in the founding and teaching of the renowned Counter-Japanese Military and Political University (抗日軍政大學).

After the Chongqing Negotiations failed to reunite China peacefully, Yu returned to Yan'an and became the deputy-editor-in-chief of the "Opinions" (言論) section of the Liberation Daily (解放日報).

In 1948, Yu Guangyuan, Mao Anying, Wu Jianxun (吳劍迅), Shi Jingtang (史敬棠) led the historic Zhangjiaji Land Reform (張家集土改) in the Bohai area of Shandong.

He proposed to loosen and facilitate borders control between Hong Kong and Shenzhen to boost economic activity and foreign trade in 1978.

In the 1960s, he authored and edited the "Political Economy Reader" with Su Xing and Gu Zhun, which served for decades as the standard economics textbook in China.

In the making of Chinese economic policies in the 1980s, Yu advocated for adding to the slogan "Look Forward" (向前看) that of "Look to Money" (向钱看), the latter a homophonic pun on the former, both pronounced "Xiang Qian Kan." Once in the presence of an assembly of high-level officials and scholars gathered to criticise his economic thoughts, Yu affirmed that the pursuit of self-interest in the free market is central to the developing a successful commercial economy, that to focus on profit only and to denounce the pursuit of profit are equally undesirable, and that "it is by 'looking to money' that one could 'look ahead.'"

This glaring rhetoric, for a long time subject to criticism from the more conservative Marxists, became the banner under which contemporary and later generations of economists make the case for reform.

Fresh air and clean water have, in this sense, become products of labor, where quantitatively calculating the positive and negative effects of industry can inform future decisions in making better use of labour in damaged environments.

Within this line of thinking, high levels of pollution can, for example, dictate the expulsion of heavy industries out of a city’s periphery, and millions of labourers can be organised to plant forests battling growing deserts.

Yu's vision influenced the later Digital Belt and Road (DBAR) project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed in consultation with former US vice president, Al Gore.

Everything can be changed into data, to simulate precisely and to try and understand what the problems are that our society faces.”[16] In 1997, prominent reformists in China, led by Yu Guangyuan, Ren Zhongyi, Gong Yuzhi, Li Rui, and Wu Xiang, voiced their strong commitment to both economic and political reforms, warned against the return of ultra-leftism in China, and envisioned a "Third Thought Liberation".

Harvard Sociologist Ezra Vogel says in the introductory remark of the English translation: “…Thanks to Yu’s account, we now understand the nature of the Party Work Conference and the drama that took place there.