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 life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim—objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)