Yang is also an amateur poet and has two known published poems, Peasants - My Kinsmen in 1998, and The Ghost of Communism in 2001, and is married to Lu Kun.
In early 1997 whilst at Beijing University, he co-founded the Current Affairs Society, a student organization committed on discussion of social issues in China, which was banned several months later by school authorities.
In 1999, Yang and some close friends started to meet regularly and formed the New Youth Society to discuss social and political issues.
[2] He wrote articles for his website that advocated political freedoms, criticised the crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement, and deplored the economic hardship of China's peasants.
In February 2007, Yang's wife, Lu Kun, requested a review of his trial because of new evidence that former State Security Bureau agent Li Yuzhou's fellow agents and superiors altered the four reports he made in order to justify arresting Yang.