At the age of 7, Yang Mingzhai began to study in a private school, and at the age of 16, he dropped out of school to work in agriculture; in 1901, he moved to Vladivostok to earn a living, and after 1908, he worked and studied in Siberia, where he was closely associated with Chinese workers engaged in heavy labor such as mining and road construction, and actively participated in the workers' movement under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, and was elected as a delegate of the Chinese workers. Before the October Revolution, he joined the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, and was sent to work as a clerk in the diplomatic service of Imperial Russia, secretly working for the Party. After the victory of the October Revolution, he mobilized Chinese workers to join the army and the war, participated in the struggle to defend the Soviet power, and did a lot of work to defend the achievements of the October Revolution. Afterwards, he was admitted to the Moscow University of Oriental Labor****ism.
In 1920, he was sent back to Vladivostok, which was occupied by the Japanese at that time, and engaged in the secret work of the Party in an open capacity as the head of the overseas Chinese.
In March 1920, a working group of the ****productivity international represented by Wigginsky came to China, Yang Mingzhai was a member of the group as an interpreter and coordinator, and they suggested to Li Dazhao in Beijing several times that they should go south to Shanghai to have talks with Chen Duxiu and other ****productivists, and they decided to initiate the establishment of a ****productivist party in China.
In May 1920, he participated in the establishment of the Shanghai Marxist Research Society, with Yang as its head.
In mid-August 1920, Yang, Chen Duxiu, Li Hanjun, and Li Da formally established "China's first ****production organization" at the editorial office of New Youth at No. 2, Yuyangli, in the French Concession of Shanghai, and named it the "China ****production Party," with "Chen Duxiu as its chairman" and "Chen Duxiu as the editor of New Youth" as the editor. Chen Duxiu was its secretary. (According to the latest edition of the History of the CCP prepared by the Party History Research Office of the Central Committee of the CCP) Yang was then converted from a member of the Russian Communist Party to a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Subsequently, Yang took part in some theoretical propaganda and teaching activities of the Party and engaged in some trade union work.
He took part in the decision to change the magazine New Youth into the organ of the initiating organization, and to found the monthly magazine ****Party, which propagated Marxism and the experience of the October Revolution. During this period, he accompanied Wigginsky on his trips to Beijing, Shanghai and Jinan to promote the establishment of ****production party organizations in these places. He rented a house at No. 6 Yuyangli, Shanghai, and opened the Sino-Russian News Agency and the Foreign Language Institute, of which he was the president. After the founding of the Chinese Socialist Youth League, the central office of the League was also located here, and from 1920 to 1921, he arranged for more than 20 people, including Liu Shaoqi, Ren Bishi, and Xiao Jinguang, to go to Soviet Russia to study. He also guided the establishment of the Shanghai Machine Trade Union, a trade union led by the C***.
In the fall of 1920, Yang Mingzhai returned to Shandong, met with Wang Zimei and Deng Enming in Jinan, and went back to Pingdu to propagate the Russian Revolution to the townspeople.
In the spring of 1921, he and Zhang Tailei went to Irkutsk as the representatives of the Chinese **** to report to the Far Eastern Secretariat of the ****productivity International on the establishment of the Chinese ****Party and the establishment of relations with the ****productivity International and drafted a report on the establishment of the Chinese Branch of the Far Eastern Secretariat of the ****productivity International, which was submitted to the Third Congress of the ****productivity International. In June of the same year, he and Zhang Tailei went to Moscow to attend the Third Congress of the ****production International.
In September 1921, Chen Duxiu returned from Guangzhou to Shanghai to become the secretary of the Central Bureau of the CPC and set up a branch of the CPC, of which he was a member.
After the First Congress of the C*** in 1921, Yang Mingzhai was engaged in the Party's theoretical education and press propaganda work.
In July 1922, he attended the Second Congress of the C*** and took an active part in formulating the Party's anti-imperialist and anti-feudal program. Later, he served as an interpreter for the Soviet Union's advisory group and did work in Guangzhou to promote cooperation between the state ****. He served on the editorial boards of the Workers' Weekly (the northern party newspaper of the C****) and the Labor News Agency, and also took part in the work of the Beijing Society for the Study of Marx's Doctrine. He studied Chinese thought and culture with Marxist theories and became one of the few Marxist theorists in the party during the founding period.
In June 1924, he published a 140,000-word book titled "Commentary on Chinese and Western Cultural Views," which criticized the retrofuturist trend that opposed the spread of Marxism in China, and played an important role in the ideological front at that time.
In the summer of 1925, Yang served as an interpreter for the Soviet Union's advisory group in Guangzhou, and in October, in order to cultivate cadres for the Chinese Revolution and the Kuomintang, he was entrusted by the Party to receive and send students to Shanghai, and led the second batch of more than a hundred students, including Zhang Wentian, Wang Jiaxiang, Ulanhu, Wu Xiuquan, etc., to the Soviet Union to study in the newly-formed Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. Later, he was in charge of general affairs at Sun Yat-sen University.
After the failure of the Revolution in 1927, Yang Mingzhai was ordered to return secretly to China via Shanghai and work in the Beijing-Tianjin area. Under the White Terror, he actively engaged in theoretical thinking. He spent two years writing and publishing the 180,000-word book Principles of Social Transformation in China, clearly stating that China "has to adopt socialism".
In order to save strength, Yang Mingzhai was arranged by the party organization to teach at the Cheshaoshan Middle School in Fengrun County, Hebei Province, where he educated many students to join the revolution. He was kind and affable to his revolutionary comrades and was a loyal elder.
In January 1930, Yang Mingzhai secretly crossed the border to the Soviet Union for medical treatment, and until the fall of the same year, he worked as a Chinese language instructor at the Khabavsk literacy station, and then went to Vladivostok, where he worked at the local newspaper and radio station.1931, he was treated as a defector and was exiled to Tomsk as an odd-job worker.1934, in August 1934, after the expiration of the period of administrative exile, he came to Moscow, and worked at the Publishing House of the Soviet Union's Foreign Workers, successively serving as a deliveryman and a schoolteacher, and then as a teacher. In February 1938, he was arrested on fabricated charges and died in May of the same year.