Yang Shangkun (1907-1998)

Chinese communist politician. He held a senior position in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP) 1956-66 but was demoted during the Cultural Revolution. He was rehabilitated in 1978, elected to the Politburo in 1982, and served as state president 1988-93.

As president, Yang played a key role, along with Deng Xiaoping, in ordering the June 1989 military crackdown against student pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. His nephew, Yang Jianhua, commanded the highly disciplined 27th Group Army, which was brought in from Hebei province to suppress the ‘uprising’. By the early 1990s his personal links with so many key commanders in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) were so extensive that some Chinese had begun to dub the PLA, ‘the Yang Family Army’.

The son of a wealthy Sichuan landlord Yang joined the CCP in 1926 and studied at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow between 1927 and 1930. A veteran of the Long March 1934-35 and the war against Japan 1937-45, Yang rose in the ranks of the CCP before being purged for alleged revisionism in the Cultural Revolution.