 Yu Huiyong was born in Shandong Province in 1925.He was greatly interested in music and learned to play a variety of instruments such as the erhu, the sanxian, and the dizi.During the Second Sino-Japanese War, he joined a communist performance group, and in 1949 went to teach at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (while simultaneously studying popular music), helping at turning a Western-oriented institution into a training ground for the communist art of People's China.