His father, Yang Jingyuan (Chinese: 杨敬渊), was a businessman and deputy manager of Nantong Tongming Electric Company.

[3] His first paper, Multiple values of meromorphic functions and of their combinations, was completed in 1962 three months after he enrolled in the graduate program at the Institute of Mathematics.

He and Zhang Guanghou published several papers in Scientia Sinica in 1965 and 1966: Research on the normality of families of analytical functions with multiple values, I.

[4] After China opened up in 1978, Yang cooperated with mathematicians in other countries, such as David Drasin in the U.S. and Walter K. Hayman in the U.K., and published papers internationally.

His monograph, Value Distribution Theory (1993, Springer-Verlag) and its Chinese version, summarize the latest research in the field up to then.