Yang Shang-k'ung

Background

He was bom into a wealthy landlord family, and his father, who married twice, had about 20 children.

Education

Yang attended middle school in Cheng-tu and joined the Communist Youth League in 1925. In the next year he was a student in Chungking at the Sino-French Institute (Chung- Fa hsueh-hsiao). This school had been set up in September 1925 by Wu Yii-chang, who was later to become an important Communist but whose major position then was as head of the KMT organization in Szechwan. The purpose of the institute was to train revolutionary cadres for the KMT, which was then working quite closely with the CCP.

Career

Yang entered the Communist Soviet area in 1932 and according to some reports became the head of the Party School in Juichin. However, according to other and apparently more reliable sources, Tung Pi-wu established and was the first president of the school. In early 1933, writing for a leading Party journal in Kiangsi, Yang was among the returned-student group members who heaped invective on certain military and Party leaders charged with undue pessimism, defeatism, and “opportunism” in the conduct of the struggle to repel the continuing attacks from Nationalist armies. This important campaign against the “Lo Ming line,” which proved to be a serious setback for the supporters of Mao Tse-tung, is described in the biography of Lo Ming.

By no later than November 1933, Yang was director of the Political Department of the First Front Army, serving directly under Chou En-lai, the Army political commissar. Not long afterward, when the Chinese Soviet Republic convened the Second All-China Congress of Soviets in Juichin (January-February 1934), Yang was elected a member of the Republic Central Executive Committee. In the fall of the same year the Communist forces moved out of Kiangsi on the Long March. At approximately that time, it appears that Yang relinquished his First Front Army political post to Ch'in Pang-hsien, another Russian-returned student, and was assigned to P'eng Te-huai Third Army Corps, one of the major components of the First Front Army, led on the Long March by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung. By no later than the spring of 1935, when the Communist columns were about halfway to their ultimate destination in north Shensi, Yang was serving as political commissar of P’eng’s Third Army Corps. He is reported to have been concurrently the deputy director of the Political Department of the Revolutionary Military Council, the top military body under the CEC. The Political Department was then headed by Wang Chia-hsiang, still another of the Russian-returned students.

During or soon after the Long March ended in the fall of 1935, Yang reassumed from Ch'in Pang-hsien the directorship of the Political Department of the First Front Army. Yang was holding this post in the early months of 1936 when the Communists crossed the Yellow River into Shansi. During this partially successful thrust into Shansi, the Red Army was able to get badly needed supplies and to recruit young men for army service (see under Liu Chih-tan). However, by the spring of 1936 the Communists were driven out of Shansi and turned back into the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia border areas. Soon after this, Yang was interviewed by Edgar Snow; he provided the American journalist with considerable information about the composition of the Red Army (e.g., age, class composition, Party and Youth League membership). Of interest is the fact that the information supplied by Yang coincided closely with statistics published in Peking many years later about the early history of the Red Army.0 Yang continued in his political post with the First Front Army, then commanded by P’eng Te-huai, until approximately the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in mid-1937 when the Communist military forces were reorganized into the Eighth Route Army. In 1937, with the possibility of war on the horizon, Yang was sent to the Peking-Tientsin area to plan for the evacuation of Communist Party members to Communist-held areas in case of war. He was then attached to the North China Party Bureau and probably worked under the direction of Liu Shao-ch'i and P’eng Chen. After the outbreak of war, the personnel of the North China Bureau, including Liu and Yang, withdrew to Shansi, the Bureau headquarters were located in Lin-fen, southwest of Taiyuan, from late 1937 until Lin-fen also fell to the Japanese in early 1938. While in Lin-fen Yang worked with members of the National Liberation Vanguards of China (NLVC), a youth organization established in north China in early 1936 (see under Li Ch’ang) that had come under CCP control. During the brief period that the NLVC and the CCP North China Bureau were located in Lin-fen, the NLVC had established a small newspaper to which Yang contributed editorials. He also lectured NLVC members on methods of organizing youths and the masses in the Shansi hinterlands.

Yang spent most of the war years in Yenan where, from 1940 to about 1946, he was the secretary-general of the Eighth Route Army Headquarters. Japanese sources claim that he was serving as secretary of the North China Bureau in 1943, as well as head of that Bureau’s United Front Department, positions that suggest he may have left Yenan occasionally to work in Japanese-occupied areas of north China. He is known to have attended the Seventh National Congress of the Party in Yenan (April-June 1945) where he was one of the speakers. Yang’s activities in the postwar period arc obscure, but he was known to have had connections with the China Liberated Areas Relief Administration (CLARA) in 1947. As its name suggests, CLARA served as the channel for shipping relief supplies to Communist-held areas, many of these supplies coming from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). This connection with CLARA may have taken Yang to Peking and Shanghai where CLARA had offices. (A discussion of both CLARA and UNRRA is found in the biography of Wu Yun- fu.)

Unlike virtually all important Communist leaders, Yang was given no post in the PRC government when it was established in the fall of 1949. In Yang’s case however, his importance in the Party hierarchy probably accounted for the fact that he was not given a government post. By at least the time the central government was formed, Yang was working as the director of the Staff Office of the Party’s Central Committee in effect, the top administrator of the affairs of the Central Committee on a day-to-day basis. Internal Party affairs are seldom discussed in the news media, but inferential evidence suggests that he has had a key role in Party personnel policies. For example, Yang frequently makes inspection tours of the provinces and has been a member of the funeral committee for nearly every CCP leader of significance who has died in the 1950’s and 1960’s a fact suggestive of his importance in protocol-conscious Communist China. Closely related to the Staff Office directorship, Yang also served as a deputy secretary- general to Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p'ing in the brief period when this post existed in the mid-fifties. And, when the new Secretariat was created in 1956 (see below), Yang was named as an alternate secretary, once again serving under Teng Hsiao-p'ing.

The one new position that Yang did receive in 1949 was as a member of the then active Sino- Soviet Friendship Association's Executive Board, a logics reflection of his training in Moscow years earlier. He served in the SSFA from its establishment in October 1949 until a new Executive Board was organized in December 1954. Also in December 1954 he was named as a representative of the CCP to the Second National Committee of the CPPCC, he was also named to the Standing Committee and was then re-elected to both posts in the Third CPPCC (1959-1964). But Yang was transferred, in effect, to the more important NPC in 1964-1965, he was elected from his native Szechwan in late 1964, and when the Third NPC held its first session in December 1964-January 1965 he was named as a vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee.

Politics

In early 1927, by which time Yang had probably joined the CCP, he was in Shanghai, where he worked briefly as a labor organizer under the direction of Chou En-lai. The Communists in Shanghai were then attempting to set off insurrectionary strikes designed to deliver the city to the Northern Expeditionary forces, which arrived there in March (see under Chao Shih- yen). However, on April 12, only three weeks after Chiang Kai-shek’s armies entered Shanghai, Chiang engineered an anti-Communist coup during which scores of Communists and leftists were killed, and those who survived went underground or fled the city. At some time in 1927 after these events, Yang went to Moscow and enrolled at Sun Yat-sen University, which, during his years there, was renamed the Communist University of the Toilers of China.

The positions within the CCP (see under Ch’en Shao-yii and Ch’in Pang-hsien, two of the most important leaders of the student faction). Yang was assigned to the Party headquarters in Shanghai, and for the next two years he worked in the underground until the constant surveillance of the Nationalists became so formidable that many Party officials, Yang among them, left Shanghai for Kiangsi where Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung had built up a sizable armed force and base area.

Connections

Yang has been married to Li Po-chao since 1930. Born in 1911, Li is also a native of Szechwan (Chungking) where her father was a hsien magistrate. In an account of her life given to Miss Nym Wales in 1937,9 Li claimed that she first became interested in the revolution at the time of the May 30th Movement in 1925 when she was 14, but even earlier, while attending a girls' normal school in Szechwan, she had been much influenced by one of her teachers, a prominent young Communist leader named Yun Tai- ying. Li joined the Communist Youth League in 1926 and went to work in Shanghai where her future husband, Yang Shang-k'un, came the following year to work with the Party. Li worked for a year with the CCP in Shanghai, and then, probably about the time that the Nationalists took over the city she, like Yang and others, fled to Moscow.

Li also enrolled at Sun Yat-sen University and like Yang returned to China in 1930, the year they were married. After a year in Shanghai with her husband, Li went briefly to the Communist-held area in Fukien where she engaged in political work. From there, in 1932, she went to Juichin, the capital of the Chinese Soviet Republic, where she was an editor for Hung-se Chung-hua (Red China), the organ of the government of the Republic, which was set up in December 1931 under the editorship of Chou I-li. In 1934 she took part in the establishment of a school of dramatics, the Gorky Drama School, which was her initiation into work which she has continued to the present. Li was one of the few women who made the Long March, which she embarked upon with the army of Mao Tse-tung, as did her husband. However, when Mao’s forces met Chang Kuo-t’ao’s Fourth Front Army in west Szechwan in mid-1935, Li separated from Mao's army (and her husband) and joined the Fourth Front Army, which moved to Sikang to spend the winter of 1935-36. This group did not join Mao’s forces in Shensi until late 1936 (see under Chang Kuo-fao).

Spouse:

Li Po-chao