Yang Jingyu

Martyr
Yang Jingyu
Yang Jingyu
Born
Ma Shangde

(1905-02-13)February 13, 1905
Queshan, Henan Province, Qing China
DiedFebruary 23, 1940(1940-02-23) (aged 35)
Mengjiang County (present-day Jingyu County), Jilin, Manchukuo
Burial place
Yang Jingyu Martyr Mausoleum [zh]
Military career
AllegianceCommunist China
Branch
Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army
UnitFirst Route Army
Chinese name
Simplified Chinese杨靖宇
Traditional Chinese楊靖宇
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinYáng Jìngyǔ
Wade–GilesYang2 Ching4-yü3
Birth name
Simplified Chinese马尚德
Traditional Chinese馬尚德
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinMǎ Shàngdé
Wade–GilesMa3 Shang4-te2

Yang Jingyu (February 13, 1905 – February 23, 1940), born Ma Shangde, was a Chinese communist, military commander and political commissar who led the First Route Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. His troops waged a guerrilla war against Japanese forces in Manchukuo (Manchuria) who were attempting to suppress resistance in the region.

Early life and education

Yang was born Ma Shangde in 1905 into a farming family in Queshan County, Henan. In 1923, he entered a textile and dyeing industrial school in Kaifeng, where he began to study Marxism. In June 1925, he joined the Communist Youth League. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1927, although a 2021 Xinhua profile gives the year as 1926.

Revolutionary career

Yang Jingyu at home in Queshan, 1926.

In April 1927, Yang led a peasant uprising in Queshan, and he led several other peasant uprisings in his home region. In the autumn of 1928, he went to Kaifeng and Luoyang to carry out underground work for the party.

In the spring of 1929, Yang was sent to Northeast China, where he became secretary of the party's special branch in Fushun and organized a workers' movement. During his years of underground work, he was arrested five times and tortured, and he later said that he had attended two universities, the "university of society" and the "university of prison". After the Mukden Incident of September 1931, he became secretary of the party's Harbin Municipal Committee and acting secretary of the military committee of its Manchuria Provincial Committee. In the Northeast, he worked under the alias Zhang Guanyi, and in 1932, he adopted the name Yang Jingyu.

Military career

In the autumn of 1932, the Manchuria Provincial Committee sent Yang to southern Manchuria, to the areas of Panshi, Hailong and Liuhe in Jilin. There he organized the South Manchuria Guerrilla Unit of the 32nd Army of the Chinese Red Army, serving as its political commissar, and established a base centered on Hongshilazi in Panshi. With the support of local people, the guerrillas set up a hospital, a uniform factory and a newspaper at the base. In September 1933, he became commander and political commissar of the 1st Independent Division of the First Army of the Northeastern People's Revolutionary Army. In 1934, he brought 17 anti-Japanese armed groups together under a joint headquarters, of which he became commander-in-chief, and that year he became commander and political commissar of the First Army.

Facing much stronger forces, Yang set up numerous secret camps in the forests and relied on mountain guerrilla warfare. He ordered his troops not to fight battles that would harm the local population, shared captured supplies with residents, and compared the army to a lamp wick and the people to the oil without which it could not burn. He also required the party to establish branches at company level.

First Route Army

In June 1936, Yang became commander and political commissar of the First Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, and in July 1936, he became commander-in-chief and political commissar of its First Route Army. He composed the First Route Army's anthem. After his forces won a victory at Motianling in 1936, the Japanese authorities forcibly relocated villages, imposed collective responsibility under the baojia system, restricted the movement of food into the mountains and offered a bounty of 20,000 yuan for his head.

From the second half of 1937, the United Army lost contact with the party's higher organizations, and Yang rejected proposals to withdraw to the Soviet Union or deeper into the Changbai Mountains, arguing that the people would lose hope if the army left. A plenary session of the party's Central Committee praised him as a model of struggle who had fought the enemy for more than seven years amid ice and snow. The defection of Cheng Bin, a division commander of the First Army, who helped the Japanese destroy more than 70 of the army's secret camps, left Yang's forces short of supplies. In the autumn and winter of 1939, Yang and Wei Zhengmin divided their troops into small groups to continue guerrilla operations.

Final campaign and death

Japanese and Manchukuo archives record at least 47 battles fought by Yang's forces in the more than 100 days from late October 1939 to his death. In early 1940, after his unit was surrounded, Yang, recognizing that he was the enemy's main target, repeatedly ordered his comrades to break out in separate groups. On 18 February 1940, the last two soldiers with him were killed, and he continued alone for five days and nights.

On 23 February 1940, Yang, who had not eaten for days, gave money to woodcutters near Mengjiang County to buy him food and cotton shoes, and one of them informed the authorities. According to a secret report by the Japanese-led border police dated March 16, 1940, which the Heilongjiang Provincial Archives released in 2025, villagers from Baoan reported him to the Mengjiang police at about 3:00 pm, and 15 Japanese and Manchukuo police officers found him on high ground at about 4:00 pm and pursued him. He refused repeated demands to surrender, reportedly declaring that he was Chinese and could not surrender to the Japanese invaders. He was shot in the chest by machine-gun fire and was killed at 4:30 pm, about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) southwest of the Mengjiang county seat, at the age of 35. The police found on his body a Mauser pistol, two Colt pistols, 6,660 yuan in cash, a notebook and a watch.

The Japanese beheaded Yang and had his body dissected, and his stomach was found to contain no grain, only undigested grass roots, tree bark and cotton wadding. Kishitani Ryūichirō, the police chief of Tonghua Province, was reportedly struck by his resolve. A Japanese translation of Yang's notebook, the original of which is lost, survives in the Tonghua Municipal Archives, which released it in 2025.

Commemoration

In 1946, Mengjiang County was renamed Jingyu County in Yang's honor. In 1949, Guo Moruo wrote a poem commemorating him. On 23 February 1958, Yang's head and body were buried together at the Jingyu Mausoleum in Tonghua, Jilin, and the Central Committee, the State Council, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De sent wreaths. In 2014, the Ministry of Civil Affairs included him in its first list of 300 famous martyrs of the war against Japan.

Yang's death site in Jingyu County is marked by a monument, and the Yang Jingyu Martyrs' Cemetery in Tonghua honors him as one of five commanders of the United Army whose heads were severed by the Japanese. The Yang Jingyu Cadre Institute, near the cemetery, opened in 2021. In his hometown, Zhumadian has built a square with his statue, restored his former residence and renovated a memorial hall to him. Streets and schools in China are named after him. The historian Patrick Fuliang Shan has examined Yang's place in Chinese collective memory and hero worship.

Personal life

In 1928, Yang left his wife and two young children to carry out revolutionary work, and he never saw them again. His grandson Ma Jizhi, a retired train driver who moved from Henan to Jilin, keeps a piece of birch bark that his parents recovered from the site of Yang's death.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Shao, Meiqi (2025-06-20). 铭记历史 缅怀先烈｜铁血将军杨靖宇：铮铮铁骨铸忠魂 [Remembering history and honoring martyrs: the iron-blooded general Yang Jingyu]. China Daily (in Chinese). Xinhua News Agency. Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Zhai, Zhuo (2021-05-18). 杨靖宇：白山黑水铸忠魂 [Yang Jingyu: a loyal soul forged among the white mountains and black waters]. CPPCC Online (in Chinese). Xinhua News Agency. Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Liu, Ying (2020-10-28). 杨靖宇：百战死沙场，碧血耀千古 [Yang Jingyu: dying on the battlefield after a hundred battles, his blood shines through the ages]. Institute of Party History and Literature of the CPC Central Committee (in Chinese). Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Cai, Mengxiao; Zhao, Shile; Shao, Shouzhi (2025-07-04). 东北抗联：用生命作答 [The Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army: answering with their lives]. Xinhua (in Chinese). Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  5. 1 2 3 Yang, Siqi; He, Shan (2025-08-27). 杨靖宇将军牺牲确切时间地点得以确认 [Exact time and place of General Yang Jingyu's death confirmed]. Xinhua (in Chinese). Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Zhou, Huiying (2025-08-28). "Archives confirm war hero's death details". China Daily. Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  7. ↑ Zhang, Boyu (2025-07-03). 吉林通化公布一份有关抗日英雄杨靖宇的档案 [Tonghua in Jilin releases an archival document on the anti-Japanese hero Yang Jingyu]. Xinhua (in Chinese). Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  8. ↑ Shi, Jianfeng; Xu, Xiao (2014-09-02). “把为抗战牺牲的国民党军人视为英烈，这是从来没有过的” [Treating Nationalist soldiers who died in the war against Japan as martyrs has never happened before]. The Paper (in Chinese). Retrieved 2026-10-31.
  9. ↑ Shan, Patrick Fuliang (2017). "Hero, Heroism, and Hero-worship: An Analysis of the Chinese Collective Memory of Yang Jingyu". American Review of China Studies. 18 (2): 43–65.