Background
He was born about 1899 (or possibly a few years earlier).
He was born about 1899 (or possibly a few years earlier).
Nothing is known of his earlier years, but in the early 1920's or shortly before, he studied at the Russian Language Institute (Owen chuan-k'o hsueh-yuan) and Peking- Normal University, apparently graduating from the latter. The Russian Language Institute had been established by the Peiyang military clique to train diplomatic personnel and the language specialists necessary to deal with the Russians in the administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria. In terms of the Chinese Communist Movement, the most notable student at the language school was Ch’U Ch’iu-pai, whose interest in Communism was stimulated by his study there. It is probable that Yang was acquainted with Ch'u at the institute or else in the Soviet Union a short time later.
Sometime in the early twenties Yang left China for Europe, but there is a good deal of uncertainty about his activities over the next two decades owing to a number of conflicting reports. He apparently studied philosophy in Germany before going to Moscow where he attended the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, an institute attended by such leading CCP members as Jen Pi-shih, Wang Jo-fei, and Hsiao Ching-kuang. After graduating he became head of the Publications Department of the Comintern’s Far East Bureau. He reportedly returned to China during the early thirties and visited the Kiangsi Soviet where Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te had built a rural Soviet base of considerable size and importance. Because Yang’s views were said to have been too close to those of Mao's, he was required to return to Moscow” by CJi’en Shao-yii, who was then contending with Mao for control of the CCP.
Yang was next identified in 1936 as head of the China Department of the Soviet Union’s Foreign Language Press, where he was in charge of translating Soviet ideological works into Chinese. In the accusations made against Yang in the sixties (see below), it was noted that he was writing articles for Communist newspapers in north China as early as August 1941, suggesting that he returned home at least by that date (although some sources claim that it was not for another year or two). He is also reported to have replaced Ch’en Shao-yii as head of the Party Histories Committee at some time during the latter stages of the Si no-Japanese War and to have made another visit to the Soviet Union during the year 1946-47.
By mid-1949 Yang was in Peking where he participated in two large conferences to mobilize the talents of China’s social scientists, many of them non-Communists. One of these meetings led to the establishment of the China Philosophy Association (see under Ai Szu-ch’i) while the other, more comprehensive in nature, laid the groundwork for the establishment of several social science organizations, among them the Political Science and Law Association, an organization in which Yang was to be involved in later years. He received no posts in the central government established in the fall of 1949, but the November issue of Hsueh-hsi (Study), then the Party’s top journal, revealed that Yang had delivered a lecture on the question of the “mass line” in Chinese Communist ideology before a cadre training class sponsored by the Peking Party Committee in October 1949. Then, rather curiously, nothing was heard of his work until April 1953 when the above-mentioned Political Science and Law Association of China (PSLAC) was established under the chairmanship of Politburo member Tung Pi-wu. Yang was elected to the First National Council and in subsequent years he was re-elected to the Second and Third National Councils (1956 and 1958).
When Yang was named to the PSLAC Council in April 1953 there was little to distinguish him from scores of other Party ideologues, but in little more than three years he rose to impressive heights in the Party hierarchy and as a Party ideologue. In May 1953 he addressed the Seventh All-China Trade Union Congress on the role of Marxism-Leninism in the emancipation of the Chinese workers,” delivering his talk on the 135th anniversary of Marx's birth. He was identified at this time as vice-president of the Party Central Committee's Marx-Lenin Institute, a theoretical training school for leading Party cadres. Less than two years later (April 1955), Yang was identified as the president, soon after which the institute was renamed the Higher Party School.
Throughout the 1950’s Yang seems to have been engaged principal)y in writing and lecturing on Marxism. For example, in May 1953 he was appointed as a lecturer for a training class of teachers who had been directed to make an intensive study of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (B), one of the most important works during the Stalinist period. Similarly, in March 1955 and again in May 1956 he lectured before forums sponsored by the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Yang’s most important article in these years, “Collective Leadership Is the Highest
Principle of Party Leadership,appeared in Hsueh-hsi (no. 3, March 2, 1954). The midfifties also witnessed a series of new appointments for Yang. In May 1954 he was identified as deputy-director of the Party Propaganda Department's Theoretical Education Division, and a short time later he was elected from his native Hupeh to the First NPC, the legislative body that brought the constitutional government into existence at its initial session in September 1954. He served throughout the term of the First NPC and was then re-elected to the Second NPC (1959-1964). In December 1954 Yang was appointed a member of the Preparatory Committee of the Academy of Sciences' Research Institute of Philosophy, which was established in 1955 (see under Hu Sheng). And when the academy established a Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences in May-June 1955, Yang was appointed as a member. He received still another academy appointment in October of that year when he was named to membership on its Science Awards Committee.
Yang, of course, was removed as president of the Higher Party School, but the date of his removal remains in doubt. From the context of the above-mentioned April 1959 forums, it appears that he then still retained the presidency. However, in September 1961 Wang Ts'ung-wu, an important member of the Party's security and control apparatus, was identified as the president. In the charges against Yang it was revealed that he had been lecturing at the School as late as April 1964; earlier, in 1961, he was also identified as director of the SchooFs Philosophical Education Research Bureau, but it is probable that he was also removed from this post after the attacks began in mid-1964. Yang was not re-elected to the Third NPC in the elections held in the fall of 1964, nor in October of that year was he re-elected to the National Council of the Political Science and Law Association. Yet two months later he was reelected to represent social science organizations on the Fourth National Committee of the CPPCC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. In a gesture that was obviously deliberate, however, he was not reelected to the CPPCC Standing Committee.
In February 1956, Yang attended the second session of the CPPCCs Second National Committee as an observer, and when the Third CPPCC was convened in April 1959, he was elected a member of the National Committee as a representative of social science organizations. On this occasion he was also named to Standing Committee membership. More important, at the Party's Eighth National Congress in September 1956, Yang was elected first among 73 alternate members of the Central Committee. His election to the Party’s highest organ came as something of a surprise, for he was less well known than virtually all the men who ranked below him, not to mention scores of Party leaders who were not even elected to the Central Committee. Less than two years later, following the death of a full Central Committee member, Yang was elevated to Central Committee membership at the Party Central Committee's Fifth Plenum, held in late May 1958 immediately after the important Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress.
