Born in Xiangshan County, Guangdong, he promoted the spread of Marxism in southern China through newspaper publications and involvement with the May Fourth Movement and the Canton–Hong Kong strike.

[1] He developed the belief that Marxism was the best means of securing China's future,[2] the only "scientific socialism",[4] and over the next decade he frequently hosted fellow communists at the family home.

[5] Yang also began writing extensively, penning a series of forty-one articles in Guangdong Zhonghua Xinbao under the collective title "World Doctrines".

In 1927, Yang attended the 5th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Wuhan, where he was elected deputy chairman of the Central Supervisory Committee.

[2] Weeks before the congress, conservative members of the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek had massacred communists in Shanghai, and CCP's alliance with the party was collapsing.

[7] As the situation became more dangerous, Yang attended an emergency party meeting on 7 August 1927, after Tan led an armed conflict against the KMT in Nanchang.

[4] Yang continued to support the CCP, writing and translating materials on Marxism, while publishing periodicals and distributing them furtively.

[2] In the meanwhile, drawing on lectures from the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University, he worked on a history of the Western world using the perspective of historical materialism.

[2] The Yang family home and ancestral hall in Yuexiu, Guangzhou, was made a cultural relic and opened to the public.