Comrade Yang Jingren, of Hui nationality, was born on September 17, 1918, in a poor Islamic clerics family in Lanzhou City, Gansu Province. He attended the Xiaoyou Street No.4 Primary School in Lanzhou and the Gansu No.1 Middle School. When he was a young man, he was progressive. Influenced by progressive figures especially those working for the Eighth Route Army office in Lanzhou and the CPC Gansu Working Committee, he gradually accepted Marxism.