Yang Shangkun - Revolutionary Career

Revolutionary Career

Yang was born to a land-owning family in Shuangjiang, Tongnan County, near the city of Chongqing in Sichuan, and studied at Chengdu Higher Normal School and its affiliated secondary school in 1920–25, and then returned to Chongqing. His older brother, Yang Yangong, was one of the founding Executive Committee members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Sichuan, and undoubtedly had an influence on Yang Shangkun’s ideological orientation. After joining the Communist Youth League in 1925, and the CCP in 1926, he enrolled in Shanghai University. Later in 1926 Yang traveled to the Soviet Union to study at the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University. Yang's post-secondary education made him one of the best educated early Communist Party leaders. Yang was a member of a group of Chinese students who studied in Moscow and returned to China to take a leading role in the CCP, later known as the 28 Bolsheviks.

The Comintern sent Yang back to China to assist and support other pro-Comintern CCP leaders, including Bo Gu, Otto Braun (Li De), Wang Ming, and Zhang Guotao, but Yang and some of the other 28 Bolsheviks, including Ye Jianying, supported Mao in preference to leaders which the Comintern preferred. Before the Long March, Yang served in Zhang Guotao's army, but joined Mao's forces when Mao and Zhang met briefly in June–July 1935, in the middle of the Long March. After Ye Jianying fled Zhang's headquarter with all of the maps and code books to Mao's camp, Yang and another colleague also fled from Zhang Guotao's headquarter with top secret documents, and they were forced to hide along the way in order to escape the Zhang's cavalry sent to capture them. Eventually they made it safely to Mao's headquarter with these important documents. Yang's defection earned him Mao's trust, but Yang's wife was not able to leave Zhang's force, and the couple did not reunite until 1936, after Zhang's force was decisively defeated by Kuomintang warlords, and the survivors fled back to Yan'an.

Yang served as a military commissar throughout the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Most of Yang's service was in armies commanded by Peng Dehuai, until Peng was removed from active command in the early 1940s. After Peng was purged in 1959 for opposing Mao's Great Leap Forward, Yang was one of the few leaders of the CCP who continued to maintain a close relationship with Peng.