Gu Yan (b. 1935), a native of Shanghai, was admitted to the Physics Department of Peking University in 1952, and after graduating in 1956, he went to the Physics Department of Lanzhou University for postgraduate studies. In 1957, he was labeled a Rightist, and was exiled to Tianshui, Gansu Province for re-education through labor. During the Great Famine, he and other exiled students decided to publish an underground magazine, which, at his suggestion, was named “Spark.” He wrote the lead article for the first issue of Spark, "Give up Illusions and Prepare for Battle!” This denounced the CCP rule of the time as "national socialism monopolized by oligarchs" and "the same as the Nazi national socialism with nothing in common with true socialism." He was arrested in October 1960 and sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1965 as the principal offender in the "Spark Counter Revolutionary Group Case". In 1974, his sentence was reduced by three years for a technological invention he made in prison, and he was assigned to work at a prison factory. After he was rehabilitated in 1980, he worked as a lecturer at Lanzhou University, and in 1983 he worked as a visiting scholar at Drexel University in Philadelphia, United States. After returning to China in 1984, he was appointed as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1985, he was appointed professor and doctoral supervisor at Lanzhou University. At the end of 1991, he was transferred to teach at the University of Science and Technology of China, and continued his research in theoretical physics after his retirement in 2000. His achievements in the field of nonlinear physics are widely recognized.
