Yang Yin

Background

Yang was born in Chung-shan (then Hsiang- shan) hsien, a coastal district in Kwangtung south of Canton where Sun Yat-sen was born.

Education

Yang Yin was educated locally.

Career

In early 1921 Lin Wei-min (a protege of Sun Yat-sen) and Su organized the Chinese Seamen’s Unioft, with its headquarters in Hong Kong. They then organized the first strike among Chinese seamen, which began in January 1922 (see under Su Chao-cheng). The strike, in which Yang participated, was his first known connection with the labor movement. He joined the CCP the following year in Canton where he had been sent to organize workers on the Canton- Hankow Railway. In 1924 Yang was in Shanghai to assist in the strike at the Nanyang Tobacco Company organized by Hsiang Ching-yu and others. In 1925-26 he was very active in the Canton-Hong Kong strike and boycott, which was directed especially against British interests in those cities. The strike, which began in June 1925 in response to the May 30th Incident in Shanghai, is described in the biography of Su Chao-cheng who was then chairman of the AllChina Federation of Labor. In mid-1926, while the strike was still in progress, the Northern Expedition began. Many of the Communists in Canton accompanied the Nationalist armies to Wuhan, but Yang remained in Canton and when the strike ended in the fall he became a member of the CCP Kwangtung Provincial Committee. In this capacity he traveled extensively throughout the province supervising Party activities, and in the latter part of 1927 he spent a brief time in Hainan Island on a similar mission.

In the meantime the uneasy KMT-CCP alliance had been completely broken by mid-1927. The Communists were suppressed in many places, under what they term the “white terror,” but they moved aggressively to gain control of the labor movement and to capture major industrial centers. Unsuccessful attempts were made to capture Nanchang and Swatow (see under Ych Ting) in August and September. In early December another attempt was made, this time in Canton. Yeh Ting, Yeh Chien-ying, and others led the Red military forces in the Canton coup, while Chang Tai-lei, the secretary of the Kwangtung CCP Committee, had been instructed to prepare for the coup within the city. Yang Yin was one of the activists who assisted him, serving on the Communists’ hastily established Revolutionary Military Committee. The Communists entered the city on December 11, 1927, and organized the Canton Commune. Yang's colleague Su Chao-cheng was made commune chairman, hut because he never got to Canton Chang T’ai-lei served as acting chairman. A “People’s Committee” was established to govern the city; subordinate to this committee, Yang, who had led some of the street fighting, was made People's Commissar for the Suppression of Counter-revolutionaries (hsiao-ch,ming fan-ko-ming wei-yuan).

The Communists were only able to hold Canton until December 13. They suffered great losses among their supporters and workers and also in the military regiment that captured the city. Chang T'ai-lei lost his life, but Yang was among those who escaped. With the survivors of the Red troops he fled to the Communist-controlled Hai-lu-feng Soviet in the East River District of Kwangtung between Canton and Swatow, which P’eng P’ai had established prior to the abortive Canton coup. Yang assisted P'eng in building up the Hai-lu-feng guerrilla units, and he served under P’eng as vice-chairman of the Hai-lu-feng Soviet Government. This was a short-lived assignment, for in February 1928 the Nationalists suppressed the Soviet, with the Communists again sustaining heavy losses. Yang and P’eng fled to Shanghai where they remained for the rest of their lives. In June-July 1928 the CCP held its Sixth Congress in Moscow, and though it appears that neither Yang nor P’eng attended it, both were elected to the Central Committee; Yang was made an alternate and P’eng a full member of the Politburo. Yang and P*eng continued their work for the Party underground until August 24, 1929, when they and some of their associates were betrayed by Pai Hsin, a former colleague in Hai-lu-feng.4 They were arrested by the International Concession police, turned over to the Nationalists, and executed outside Shanghai on August 31. Yang and P’eng are celebrated in Communist histories as revolutionary “martyrs,” and to honor them a military institute known as the P'ing-Yang Infantry School was established in the central soviet region where Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te had their headquarters in the early thirties.

Connections

Yang was apparently married twice. His first wife is said to have died before he became a Communist in 1923. In early 1963 the Communist press mentioned that P’an P’ei-chen, described as the “wife of martyr Yang Yin had attended a meeting of representatives of old revolutionary bases in Kwangtung. Yang P'ao-an, one of the eight Communists elected to the KMT Central Executive Committee at the Second KMT Congress in January 1926 was said to have been his uncle.

Spouse:

P’an P’ei-chen