Yang Shangkun

Who was Yang Shangkun?

Yang Shangkun was President of the People's Republic of China from 1988 to 1993, and was a powerful Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission. He married Li Bozhao in 1929, one of the few women to participate in the Long March, as did Yang.

Yang attended university in Shanghai before studying Marxist theory in Moscow, making him one of the most well-educated leaders of the early Chinese Communist Party. Yang returned to China as one of the 28 Bolsheviks and originally supported the early communist leader Zhang Guotao, but switched allegiance to Mao's faction during the Long March. He served as a political commissar during the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Yang held a number of political positions, eventually becoming a member of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. He was purged when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, and was not recalled until 1978, after Deng Xiaoping rose to power where he became one of the Eight Elders of China. Yang promoted economic reform but opposed political liberalization, a position which Deng eventually came to identify with. Yang reached the height of his political career after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, but his organized opposition to Jiang Zemin's leadership led Deng to force Yang to retire.