Moscow Sun Yat-sen University
Yang was born to a land-owning family in Shuangjiang, Tongnan County, near the city of Chongqing in Sichuan, and studied at Chengdu Higher Normal School and its affiliated secondary school in 1920–25, and then returned to Chongqing. His older brother, Yang Yingong was one of the founding Executive Committee members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Sichuan, and influenced Yang Shangkun’s ideological orientation. After joining the Communist Youth League in 1925, and the CCP in 1926, he enrolled in Shanghai University, where he studied politics. Later in 1927 Yang traveled to the Soviet Union and enrolled at the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University, where he studied Marxist theory and techniques of political organization and mobilization.