Yang Liwei

Early life and career as a pilot

Yang Liwei was born on 21 June 1965 in Suizhong town, Suizhong County, Liaoning. According to a 2003 China News Service report, he was selected by the Air Force as a pilot cadet in June 1983, in his final year of high school, and entered the Air Force's Eighth Flight School. After graduating in 1987 he served as a pilot and squadron leader in an Air Force aviation division, flying fighter and ground-attack aircraft, and logged 1,350 hours of safe flight, earning the rating of first-class pilot. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in September 1988 and received third-class merit citations in 1992 and 1994.

Selection as an astronaut and Shenzhou 5

In January 1998 Yang was selected from among Air Force pilots for China's first group of astronauts and spent about five years in training. At 9:00 a.m. on 15 October 2003 he lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center aboard Shenzhou 5, becoming the first Chinese person in space; the spacecraft orbited the Earth 14 times and landed in Siziwang Banner, Inner Mongolia, on 16 October after 21 hours and 23 minutes, and he left the capsule unassisted. During the flight he displayed the flags of China and the United Nations in the cabin. In November that year the Party Central Committee, the State Council and the Central Military Commission conferred on him the title of “Space Hero” and the Space Merit Medal.

In 2010 Yang published an autobiography, Tiandi Jiuchong (“Nine Layers of Heaven and Earth”). He recalled that when the rocket reached an altitude of 30 to 40 kilometres the launch vehicle and spacecraft went into a violent low-frequency resonance lasting about 26 seconds, and that he at one point “felt I was going to die”; he also wrote that looking at the stars and the Earth from space made him feel “very small.”

Later work

After the Shenzhou 5 mission Yang moved into technical and management work in the crewed space program and was promoted to major general. During the first session of the 13th CPPCC National Committee in 2018 he addressed the plenary as a committee member and deputy director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office under the CMC Equipment Development Department. Later official reports describe him as deputy chief designer of the China Manned Space Program, responsible mainly for overall engineering and management. On 24 April 2024, Space Day of China, he received the Qian Xuesen Highest Achievement Award. On 21 September 2026 he met Chinese and foreign journalists at the State Council Information Office as a special-class astronaut and deputy chief designer of the program, saying that he and the rest of the first astronaut group had formally retired from flight status in October 2025 and that he now works on the technical side of astronaut selection and training.