Yang Kaihui was born in the small village of Bancang in Changsha, Hunan Province, on November 6, 1901. Her name meant “Opening Wisdom”, although she came to be nicknamed Xia, meaning “Little Dawn.” Her father was Yang Changji, a teacher and leftist intellectual, her mother was Yang Zhenxi, while she had a brother three years older than her, Yang Kaizhi. Through his teaching of ethics at the First Normal School of Changsha, Changji had become a father figure to a pupil named Mao Zedong, later writing in his journal that “it is truly difficult to imagine someone so intelligent and handsome” as him. A friendship developing, in summer 1916, Mao was invited to spend several days at Yang’s Bancang home, walking twenty miles in straw sandals in order to get there. On this occasion, he did not talk to either Zhenxi or Kaizhi, instead bowing his head to them as a mark of respect.

Yang Changji gained a professorship at Peking University and had moved his family to the city when Mao came to Peking in September 1918 with several like-minded friends from Hunan. Upon arrival, they stayed in the Yangs’ small house in the north of the city. Here, Mao met Kaihui again, and the two discovered a mutual attraction. A friend who knew Kaihui at the time described her as “small in stature and round-faced, with deep-set eyes and pale white skin”, and her appearance impressed both Mao and his friends. Kaihui later related that she had “fallen madly in love with him already when I heard about his numerous accomplishments” but did not make her feelings immediately known. She kept “hoping and dreaming” that he shared her feelings and decided that she would never marry anyone but him.

In January 1920, Yang Changji died. Mao was in Peking ostensibly on business, though biographer Stuart Schram suspected his presence was partly due to his desire to comfort Kaihui. Yang Kaihui and her mother returned to Changsha with her father’s remains, and she soon entered the Fusiang Girls’ School. At the missionary school, her exposure to revolutionary ideas got her labeled a ‘rebel’, who refused to pray and cut her hair short in defiance of convention.

Mao had gone from Peking to Shanghai, where he worked in a laundry and joined a Communist group for the first time. Following the overthrow of Hunanese warlord Zhang Jingyao by generals favourable to Mao, he returned to Changsha in July 1920. Mao opened a bookstore and publishing house. Now possessing social status and financial security, Mao was able to marry Kaihui.

Yang joined the Chinese Socialism Youth League in the second half of 1920 as one of the first members in Hunan. She married Mao Zedong that winter, without any wedding ceremony or other celebrations. Yang joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the beginning of 1922. In April 1923, Mao went to the CPC’s Central Committee in Shanghai to work as the Organization Department Minister. In the following year, Yang Kaihui, together with her two children, Mao Anying and Mao Anqing, joined her husband in Shanghai and organized an evening school at a cotton mill. In 1925, accompanied by Mao, Yang Kaihui went to Shaoshan to organize peasant movements, while caring for her husband and educating their children. At the same time, she continued to teach peasant evening schools and contracted with other comrades. In the beginning of 1927, Mao inspected the peasant movement in Hunan. Yang Kaihui sorted through the large amount of investigation materials and neatly copied them down. Mao’s Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan including Yang’s contributions, was published in March of that year. During this period Yang organized many movements among peasants, labor, women, and students.

In early 1928, Mao began a relationship with He Zizhen without ending his marriage with Yang Kaihui.

Yang wrote poems to express her loneliness and her longing for Mao. One of them, “偶感 [Ǒu Gǎn]” (“Occasional Feeling”), was written in October 1928, two years before her death, and discovered when her former residence was being repaired about 50 years later:

In October 1930, the local KMT warlord He Jian captured Yang Kaihui and her son Mao Anying. Her captors wanted her to publicly renounce Mao Zedong and the CPC, but she refused to do so. Even under torture, she is reputed to have told her captors that “You could kill me as you like, you would never get anything from my mouth”, “Chopping off the head is like the passing of wind, death could frighten cowards, rather than our Communists”, “Even if the seas run dry and the rocks crumble, I would never break off relations with Mao Zedong”, and “I prefer to die for the success of Mao’s revolution career”.

Yang was executed in Changsha on November 14, 1930 at the age of 29. Her children with Mao Zedong were effectively orphaned, and were rediscovered years later. Mao Anying later died early in the Korean War, and Mao Anqing became a translator for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

Although he would have relationships with other women, Mao mourned Kaihui for the rest of his life. In summer 1937, he conversed with the American reporter Agnes Smedley, reciting to her a poem that he had written in memory of Kaihui.

In spring 1957, Li Shuyi, a friend and comrade of Mao and Yang’s, wrote a poem in memory of her own husband, Liu Chih-hsün, a member of the Red Army who had been killed in 1933. Sending her poem to Mao, he responded by composing his own poem commemorating both Liu and Kaihui, titled “The Immortals”, which he would subsequently publish: