---
title: "Yu Guangyuan"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Yu Guangyuan"
aliases: ["于光远"]
first_seen: "2026-08-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Qian Xuesen","somatic science","human body ESP dispute","He Zuoxiu","Chinese Communist Party science policy"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


Chinese philosopher-economist and senior Communist Party science official — a former director of science policy at the Party's Central Propaganda Department and a translator of Engels' *Dialectics of Nature* into Chinese — who became the most senior institutional skeptic of 1980s Chinese ESP and qigong research, writing *反"人体特异功能"论* [*Against "Human Body ESP" Theory*] and running the government's own investigation team that spent years testing and debunking ESP claimants.

Matters to this vault as the opposing pole of the [[entity-qian-xuesen|Qian Xuesen]] qigong/ESP dispute: every account gathered so far of Qian's advocacy for [[entity-somatic-science|somatic science]] frames it as one side of the Qian–Yu Guangyuan disagreement, with Yu as the older, senior, and institutionally opposed authority Qian's claim needs to be read against — not a footnote to it.

## References
- Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-28-do-qian-xuesens-own-1989-book-and-the.md (entity candidate; no dedicated claim-note yet — a next-session target if his own writing or the investigation team's record surfaces)