Early Life
Yang Dezhi, the son of a blacksmith, worked as a miner at Anyuan Coal Mine near Pinghsiang at the age of 16 (1926) and may have heard Mao speak during the 1927 strike organization efforts. He later joined a force that followed Mao to Changsha in the summer of 1927, and was defeated in that aborted uprising. Joining the CCP in 1928, Yang fought in the early battles around Jinggangshan and was assigned to Lin Biao’s 28th Regiment where he participated in battles in Jiangxi and Fujian in 1929. After 1932, Yang commanded the 1st Regiment, 1st Division under Lin and Nie Rongzhen on the Long March.
Read more about this topic: Yang Dezhi
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.”
—W.E. (William Ewart)