Former Residence of Yuan Zhenying

Former Residence of Yuan Zhenying

The former residence of Yuan Zhenying is located at No. 28 Nanbian Road, Chazhong Village, Wentang Community, Dongcheng Subdistrict. GPS coordinates: 23°02'57.3", 113°49'53.3", elevation 21 meters.

Yuan Zhenying (1894–1979), pen name Zhenying, was born here on July 14, 1894. At the age of 11, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents and attended an English school there. In 1915, he enrolled in the School of Arts at Peking University. In 1920, he worked for the Hong Kong Morning Post and the Guangzhou-based Minhao Daily and New Republic Daily. During this period, to support Guangdong students’ protests against the Twenty-One Demands and the boycott of Japanese goods, he organized the Guangdong Eastern Tour Journalists Group to carry out promotional activities in Japan and Korea. On his way back to China via Shanghai in July of the same year, he was invited by Chen Duxiu to serve as the editor of the “Russian Studies” column for New Youth, actively promoting Marxism-Leninism. In August of the same year, he joined the early Communist organization in Shanghai and the Shanghai Socialist Youth League, and contributed to the publication of the monthly magazine The Communist. He made significant contributions to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Socialist Youth League. At the end of 1920, he went to Guangzhou and served as the principal of the Guangdong Provincial No. 1 Middle School. In the spring of 1921, he participated in establishing the early Communist organization in Guangzhou and became a member of it. After the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party—. In August 1921, he went to France to study at the University of Lyon’s Sino-French Institute. In August 1924, after completing his doctorate, he returned to China and became a professor at the National Guangdong University (the predecessor of Sun Yat-sen University). In 1926, he served as a political instructor at the Central Military and Political School. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he worked at the Guangdong Provincial Academy of Social Sciences. He passed away in January 1979.

The former residence of Yuan Zhenying is a blue-brick tile house facing south, surrounded by local residential houses. In 1905, Yuan Zhenying left his hometown for Hong Kong with his father, leaving the house vacant. By June 1940, it housed the headquarters of the Dongguan County Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Since the liberation of Dongguan to the present, the house has remained unoccupied.

Wentang Community: Located east of Dongcheng Subdistrict in Dongguan City, Wentang Community covers an area of 11.6 square kilometers. It comprises 22 joint-stock economic cooperatives, with 2,421 household registrations and a permanent population of over 50,000, including more than 10,000 local residents and over 40,000 migrants. The most common surname is Yuan.

In 2016, the total collective income of Wentang Community at both community and cooperative levels reached 240 million yuan, including 16 million yuan for the neighborhood committee and 224 million yuan for the joint-stock economic cooperatives. The community currently has 2,000 acres of protected farmland and over 300 acres of available construction land. More details on Wentang Community++