Yang Deyu, male, Han nationality, is a native of Yanzhou, Shandong Province. He was born in 1949 and graduated from Shandong Institute of Mines in 1974.
Yang spent his formative years at the Yanzhou Mine Bureau. He was a technician and a party secretary in the bureau's Tancun coalmine station. In the 1980s, he became first the deputy director-general and later the director-general of the station.
In the 1990s, Yang became deputy director-general of the Yanzhou Mine Bureau and also served as director-general of the security supervision bureau. He left the bureau in 1997 to become the general manager of the Yanzhou Coal Mine Stock Company Limited.