Background
Yang was born into a family of tenant farmers in Changsha hsien, where the provincial capital is located.
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Yang Li-san
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Yang Li-san was one of the CCP’s leading military logistics experts. At the time of his death he had belonged for 27 years to the Party, joining it not long before he became a platoon commander in the Wuhan garrison force, which mutinied at the time of the Nanchang Uprising on August 1, 1927, and subsequently went to the aid of Mao Tse-tung, fighting with the peasants in the Autumn Harvest Uprisings in the fall of 1927.
Education
Nothing is known about his education aside from the statement in his obituary that it was “only through long periods of half-farming and half-study that he acquired his cultural knowledge.” lie is said to have come under the influence of Communism in 1921, the year the CCP was founded.
Career
From this time Yang remained with the headquarters of Mao’s Red Army. He was made chief aide-de-camp and director of the General Affairs Department of the First Front Army in Kiangsi (commanded by Chu Te and Mao) in October 1930. When this army made its march on Fukien in 1932 Yang was put in charge of the Staff Office belonging to the Rear Services (logistics) Department of the Revolutionary Military Council, the chief military directorate of the Communists in the Kiangsi Soviet. When the Kiangsi Communists made the Long March from 1934 to 1935, Yang continued in logistics work. During the Sino-Japanese War he doubled in the role of political commissar and head of the military depot at Yenan. He was made deputy chief-of-staff of the general headquarters at the front in the autumn of 1943, but he was mostly occupied with the post of chief of the Rear Services Department, to which he was concurrently assigned. Though he had belonged to the CCP since 1927 he held few Party positions during his career, however, in 1945 he became a member of the Standing Committee and director of the Economic Department of the Central Bureau of the CCP organization in the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region. Possibly, therefore, beginning in 1943 when he was assigned to the fighting front, he may have begun to be concerned with the border area. It was an area of considerable strategic importance because it commanded the communications route by which the Red forces could move from the Yenan base into Shantung. Liu Po-ch'eng and his 129th Division were in charge of military operations there, while Yang Hsiu-feng was in charge of the political administration.
After the end of the Sino-Japanese War Yang became the director of the Joint Office of General Affairs of the four-province border area, and at the same time deputy chief of the North China Office of Finance and Economics, the latter a rather uncertain title taken from Communist sources, which probably refers to an office in the North China People’s Government, established in August 1948. At the same time that he held the latter posts he was chief of the Rear Services of the Revolutionary Military Council and commander of Rear Services for the North China Military Region. He was a representative of the Second Field Army (commanded by Liu Po-ch'ing) to the First CPPCC, which opened in September 1949 to inaugurate the PRC government on October 1. During this session he served as a member of the Committee to Draft the Organic Law of the CPPCC, one of the most important documents of the new government. With the inauguration of the PRC he served briefly in a ministerial post, holding the portfolio of the Ministry of Food Industry from its creation until it was abolished a year later. From 1949 until 1954 he also served as a member of the important Finance and Economics Committee under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet). Apart from these posts in the central government, Yang continued to hold important positions in the military establishment. In the same month that he became minister of Food Industry (October 1949), he was also appointed to head the Rear Services Department under the People's Revolutionary Military Council, the highest military organ under the central government. He continued as director of rear services until replaced just before his death by Huang K’o-ch’eng. Concurrently, Yang was the director of the PLA Finance Department from 1953 until his death.
Yang died on November 28, 1954 in the Kremlin hospital in Moscow where he had gone for a treatment of a brain tumor, for which he had been under treatment for some time. The facts of his career are drawn mainly from the official obituary published in the Peking JMJP of December 8, 1954, and from a commemorative article written by Nieh Jung-chen December 6, 1954).
Politics
In 1925 Yang is reported to have organized a peasant association in Changsha hsien, and in January 1927 he joined the CCP. He belonged to an independent military unit at Wuhan by the summer of 1927, and just prior to the uprising at Nanchang on August 1, 1927, the uprising that signaled the break in relations between the CCP and the KMT, his unit joined the Wuhan garrison force commanded by Lu Te-ming. The garrison force also revolted in sympathy with the Communists on the day after the uprising at Nanchang, following which it set out by boat for Kiukiang (Chiu- chang) on the Yangtze north of Nanchang, with the aim of joining the Nanchang insurgents. The Communists were quickly defeated at Nanchang and the Wuhan garrison arrived too late to make connections with the routed troops. Therefore, it moved to the Hunan-north Kiangsi area where it soon merged with local peasant forces there under the supervision of the Communists. In September Mao staged the first of the Autumn Uprisings in Hunan, and the Wuhan garrison was on the spot to join forces with his peasant- staffed army. When they were defeated soon thereafter, Mao led the survivors, Yang among them, to the mountains of Chingkang on the Hunan-Kiangsi border where he proceeded to establish a permanent guerrilla base.
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Born
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Died
1954 (aged 54) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1932
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1943
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1943
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1945
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1948
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1949