124 Facts About Yan Xishan

Yan Xishan effectively controlled the province of Shanxi from the 1911 Xinhai Revolution to the 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War.

Yan Xishan maintained an ambivalent attitude towards the Communists until 1939, and participated in the Second United Front against the Japanese from 1937.

Yan Xishan subsequently negotiated with the Japanese from 1940 to 1943, and allied himself with the Japanese against the Communists from 1944 until fleeing Shanxi in 1949.

Yan Xishan has been viewed by Western biographers as a transitional figure who advocated using Western technology to protect Chinese traditions, while at the same time reforming older political, social and economic conditions in a way that paved the way for the radical changes that would occur after his rule.

Yan Xishan was born during the late Qing dynasty in Wutai County, Xinzhou, Shanxi, to a family who had been bankers and merchants for generations.

Yan Xishan observed the progress made by the Japanese, whom the Chinese had previously considered unsophisticated and backward, and began to worry about the consequences if China were to fall behind the rest of the world.

Yan Xishan eventually concluded that the Japanese had successfully modernized largely because of the government's abilities to mobilize its populace in support of its policies and to the close respectful relationship that existed between the military and civilian populations.

Yan Xishan attributed the surprising Japanese victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War to the enthusiastic mobilization of the Japanese public in supporting the military.

Yan Xishan attempted to popularize Sun's ideology by organizing an affiliated "Blood and Iron Society" within the ranks of Chinese students at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy.

When Yan Xishan returned to China in 1909, he was assigned as a division commander of the New Army in Shanxi but secretly worked to overthrow the Qing.

Yan Xishan justified his actions by attacking the Qing's failure to repel foreign aggression, and he promised a wide range of social and political reforms.

In 1911 Yan Xishan hoped to join forces with another prominent Shanxi revolutionary, Wu Luzhen, to undermine Yuan Shikai's control of north China, but the plans were aborted after Wu was assassinated.

Yan Xishan was elected military governor by his comrades but was unable to prevent a subsequent invasion by the troops of Yuan Shikai, who occupied most parts of Shanxi in 1913.

In 1917, shortly after Yuan Shikai's death, Yan Xishan solidified his control over Shanxi, ruling there uncontested.

Yan Xishan's inability to resist Yuan's military domination of northern China was a factor contributing to Sun Yat-sen's decision not to personally pursue the presidency of the Republic of China, which was established after the end of the Qing dynasty.

Yan Xishan believed that unless he modernized and revived Shanxi's economy and infrastructure, he would be unable to prevent Shanxi from being overrun by rival warlords.

Yan Xishan dealt with the epidemic by issuing instructions on modern germ theory and plague management to his officials.

Yan Xishan instructed people that the plague was caused by tiny germs that were breathed into the lungs, the disease was incurable, and the only way to keep the disease from spreading was physical isolation of the infected.

Yan Xishan ordered his officials to keep infected family members, neighbors, or even entire infected communities from each other by threat of police force if necessary.

Yan Xishan was impressed with the zeal, talents, and modern outlook of the personnel and subsequently compared foreigners favorably to his own conservative and generally apathetic officials.

Yan Xishan attempted to modernize the state of medicine in China by funding the Research Society for the Advancement of Chinese Medicine, based in Taiyuan, in 1921.

The main skills that Yan Xishan hoped physicians trained at the school would learn were a standardized system of diagnosis; sanitary science, including bacteriology; surgical skills, including obstetrics; and the use of diagnostic instruments.

Yan Xishan hoped that his support of the school would eventually lead to increased revenues in the domestic and international trade of Chinese drugs, improved public health, and improved public education.

Yan Xishan continued to promote a tradition of Chinese medicine that was informed by Western medical science throughout his period of governance, but much of the teaching and publication that the school of medicine produced was limited to the area around Taiyuan.

Yan Xishan sent students from Shanxi to complete science and engineering degrees at Japanese, American and English universities.

Yan Xishan's allies included the northern warlord Feng Yuxiang, the Guangxi Clique led by Li Zongren, and the left-leaning Kuomintang faction led by Wang Jingwei.

The main causes of Yan Xishan's defeat were the low population and the lack of development in the areas that he had under his control, which made him incapable of fielding a large and well-equipped army similar to the ones commanded by Chiang at the time.

Yan Xishan was unable to match the quality of leadership in Chiang's officer corps and the prestige that Chiang and the Nationalist Army had at the time.

Yan Xishan returned to Shanxi only through a complex effort of intrigue and politicking.

Yan Xishan remained in the background of Shanxi politics until the Nanjing government's failure to resist the Japanese takeover of Manchuria after the Mukden Incident gave Yan Xishan and his followers an opportunity to informally overthrow the Kuomintang in Shanxi.

On 18 December 1931, a group of students, supported and perhaps orchestrated by officials loyal to Yan Xishan, gathered in Taiyuan to protest the Nanjing government's policy of not fighting the Japanese.

Future difficulties in securing the loyalty of other Chinese warlords across China, the ongoing civil war with the Communists, and the ongoing threat of Japanese invasion motivated Chiang to let Yan Xishan retain the title of Pacification Commissioner in 1932, and he appointed Yan Xishan to the central government's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission.

Yan Xishan was successful in creating a complex of heavy industries around Taiyuan but neglected to publicize the extent of his success outside of Shanxi, probably to deceive Chiang.

When Yan Xishan refused to send taxes collected from the trade of salt, produced in Shanxi's public factories, to the central government, Chiang retaliated by flooding the market of northern China with so much salt, produced around coastal China, that the price of salt in China's northern provinces dropped extremely low.

In 1935, Chiang's announcement of a "five-year plan" to modernize Chinese industry was perhaps inspired by the successes of the "Ten-Year Plan" that Yan Xishan had announced several years earlier.

In Shanxi, Yan Xishan implemented numerous successful reforms in an effort to centralize his control over the province.

Yan Xishan attempted to develop his army as a locally recruited force, which cultivated a public image of being servants, rather than masters, of the people.

Yan Xishan developed an all-encompassing idiosyncratic ideology and disseminated it by sponsoring a network of village newspapers and traveling dramatic troupes.

Yan Xishan devised a system of public education, producing a population of trained workers and farmers literate enough to be indoctrinated without difficulty.

The early date by which Yan Xishan devised and implemented the reforms, during the Warlord Era, contradicts later claims that these reforms were modeled on Communist programs and not vice versa.

When Yan Xishan returned from Japan in 1909, he was a firm proponent of militarism and proposed a system of national conscription along German and Japanese lines.

Yan Xishan then decreased the size of the army until 1923 to save money until a rumor circulated that rival warlords were planning on invading Shanxi.

Yan Xishan then introduced military reforms designed to train a rural militia of 100,000 men, along the lines of Japanese and American reserves.

Yan Xishan attempted via conscription to create a civilian reserve, which would become the foundation of society in Shanxi.

Yan Xishan's troops were perhaps the only army in the Warlord era drawn exclusively from the province in which it was stationed, and because he insisted for his soldiers to perform work to improve Shanxi's infrastructure, including road-maintenance and assisting farmers, and because his discipline ensured that his soldiers actually paid for anything that they took from civilians, the army in Shanxi enjoyed much more popular support than most of his rivals' armies in China.

Yan Xishan built an arsenal in Taiyuan that for the entire period of his administration remained the only center in China that could produce field artillery.

The presence of the arsenal was one of the main reasons for Yan Xishan maintaining Shanxi's relative independence.

Yan Xishan went to great lengths to eradicate social traditions that he considered antiquated.

Yan Xishan insisted for all men in Shanxi to abandon their Qing-era queues and gave to police instructions to clip off the queues of anyone still wearing them.

In one instance, Yan Xishan lured people into theatres to have his police systematically cut the hair of the audience.

Yan Xishan attempted to combat widespread female illiteracy by creating in each district at least one vocational school in which peasant girls could be given a primary-school education and taught domestic skills.

Yan Xishan attempted to eradicate the custom of foot binding by threatening to sentence men who married women with bound feet and mothers who bound their daughters' feet to hard labor in state-run factories.

Yan Xishan discouraged the use of the traditional lunar calendar and encouraged the development of local Boy Scout organizations.

Yan Xishan continued to complain about the availability of narcotics into the 1930s and after 1932 executed over 600 people caught smuggling drugs into Shanxi.

Yan Xishan suffered from a lack of experienced, trained advisers capable of directing even moderately complicated tasks related to economic development.

Yan Xishan was emotionally attached to Confucianism by virtue of his upbringing, and he identified its values as a historically effective solution to the chaos and disorder of his time.

Yan Xishan justified his rule via Confucian political theories and attempted to revive Confucian virtues as being universally accepted.

Many of the reforms that Yan Xishan attempted were undertaken with the intention of demonstrating that he was a junzi, the epitome of Confucian virtue.

Yan Xishan taught that everyone had a capacity for innate goodness, but to fulfill that capacity people had to subordinate their emotions and desires to the control of their conscience.

Yan Xishan admired the Ming dynasty philosophers Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming, who disparaged knowledge and urged men to act on the basis of their intuition.

Yan Xishan attributed much of the West's vitality to Christianity and believed that China could resist and overtake the West only by generating an ideological tradition that was equally inspiring.

Yan Xishan appreciated the efforts of missionaries, mostly Americans who maintained a complex of schools in Taigu, to educate and modernize Shanxi.

Yan Xishan regularly addressed the graduating classes of the schools but was generally unsuccessful in recruiting the students to serve his regime.

Yan Xishan supported the indigenous Christian church in Taiyuan and at one time seriously considered using Christian chaplains in his army.

Yan Xishan deliberately organized many features of his Heart-Washing Society on the Christian church, including ending each service with hymns praising Confucius.

Yan Xishan urged his subjects to place their faith in a supreme being that he called "Shangdi" and justified his belief in Shangdi via the Confucian classics but described Shangdi in terms very similar to the Christian interpretation of God.

In 1911, Yan Xishan came to power in Shanxi as a disciple of Chinese nationalism but subsequently came to view nationalism as merely another set of ideas that could be used to achieve his own objectives.

Yan Xishan stated that the primary goal of the Heart-Washing Society was to encourage Chinese patriotism by reviving the Confucian church, which led foreigners to accuse him of attempting to create a Chinese version of Shinto.

Yan Xishan attempted to moderate some aspects of Sun Yat-sen's ideology that he viewed as potentially threatening to his rule.

Yan Xishan altered some of Sun's doctrines before he disseminated them in Shanxi by formulating his own version of Sun's Three Principles of the People that replaced the principles of nationalism and democracy with the principles of virtue and knowledge.

In 1931 Yan Xishan returned from his exile in Dalian impressed with the apparent successes of Soviet Union's first five-year plan and attempted to reorganize the economy of Shanxi by using Soviet methods, according to a local "Ten-Year Plan" that Yan Xishan himself developed.

Unlike Marx, Yan Xishan reinterpreted Communism to correct what he believed was Marxism's chief flaw: the inevitability of class warfare.

Yan Xishan praised Marx for his analysis of the material aspects of human society but professed to believe that there was a moral and spiritual unity of mankind that implied that a state of harmony was closer to the human ideal than conflict.

Yan Xishan interpreted Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as promoting socialism to combat the spread of communism.

In spite of his efforts, Yan Xishan did not succeed in making his school of thought widely popular in Shanxi, and most of his subjects refused to believe that his true objectives differed substantially from those of past regimes.

Yan Xishan himself blamed the failure of his ideology to become popular on the faults of his officials by charging that they abused their power and failed to explain his ideas to the common people.

Yan Xishan did not come into serious conflict with the Japanese until the early 1930s.

Japan's subsequent success in taking Manchuria in 1931 terrified Yan Xishan, who stated that a major objective of his Ten-Year Plan was to strengthen Shanxi's defense against the Japanese.

In December 1931, Yan Xishan was warned that after taking control of Manchuria, the Japanese would attempt to take control of Inner Mongolia by subverting Chinese authority in Chahar and Suiyuan.

Yan Xishan was a particular target because of his education in Japan and his much-publicized admiration of the country's modernization.

Yan Xishan likely used the negotiations to frighten Chiang into using his armies to defend Shanxi since he was afraid that Chiang was preparing to sacrifice northern China to avoid fighting the Japanese.

Yan Xishan himself admitted that his troops had fought poorly during the campaign.

Yan Xishan placed his best troops and most able generals, including Zhao Chengshou and Yan Xishan's son-in-law, Wang Jingguo, under the command of Fu Zuoyi.

Yan Xishan relocated his headquarters to a remote corner of the province and effectively resisted Japanese attempts to completely seize Shanxi.

Yan Xishan then negotiated a secret anti-Japanese "united front" with the Communists in October 1936 and, after the Xi'an Incident two months later, successfully influenced Chiang to enter a similar agreement with the Communists.

Yan Xishan allowed Communist agents working under Zhou Enlai to establish a secret headquarters in Taiyuan and released Communists that he had been holding in prison, including at least one general, Wang Ruofei.

That caused Yan Xishan to believe that a Japanese invasion of Shanxi was imminent and so he flew to Nanjing to communicate the situation to Chiang.

Yan Xishan left his meeting in Nanjing with an appointment as commander of the Second War Zone, comprising Shanxi, Suiyuan, Chahar, and northern Shaanxi.

Yan Xishan issued orders not to withdraw or to surrender under any circumstances, vowed to resist Japan until the Japanese had been defeated, and invited his own soldiers to kill him if he betrayed his promise.

Yan Xishan initially responded warmly to the re-entry of the arrival of Communist forces, who were greeted with enthusiasm by Yan Xishan's officials and officers.

At Yuanping, a single brigade of Yan Xishan's troops held out against the Japanese advance for over a week, which allowed reinforcements sent by the Nationalist government to take up defensive positions at the Battle of Xinkou.

Shortly before losing Taiyuan, Yan Xishan moved his headquarters to Linfen, in southwestern Shanxi.

Yan Xishan responded by repeating his promise not to surrender until Japan had been defeated.

Possibly because of the severity of his losses in northern Shanxi, Yan Xishan abandoned a plan of defense based on positional warfare and began to reform his army as a force capable of waging guerrilla warfare.

Wei prevented the Japanese from seizing the strategic Zhongtiao Mountain Range, but the loss of Linfen and Lingshi forced Yan Xishan to withdraw with what remained of his army across the Yellow River, into Yichuan County, Shaanxi, which closely neighbored the Communists' base, the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region.

Yan Xishan accused the New Army leadership of replacing Kuomintang officers with Communists, seizing grain supply from his troops, and sabotaging the Nationalist-led Winter Offensive.

Yan Xishan's forces continued to battle the Japanese throughout 1940 as part of an indecisive guerrilla campaign.

Yan Xishan agreed to send a high-level representative to meet with the Japanese and obtained permission from the central government to negotiate with them for an agreement to remove all troops from Shanxi in exchange for Yan Xishan's co-operation.

Two months later the Japanese repeated their charge that Yan Xishan was a "dupe" of the Communists.

When Iwamatsu sent his chief of staff, Colonel Tadashi Hanaya, to Qixian for the purpose of delivering what Yan Xishan demanded, Yan Xishan called the Japanese concessions inadequate and refused to negotiate with them.

An American reporter who visited Shanxi in 1944 observed that Yan Xishan "was thought of not necessarily as a puppet but rather as a compromise between the extremes of the treason at Nanjing and national resistance at Chongqing" by the Japanese.

Yan Xishan was known to have successfully used a variety of tactics to achieve those defections: flattery, face-saving gestures, appeals to idealism, and genuine expressions of mutual interest.

Yan Xishan was successful in keeping the presence of the Japanese from American and Nationalist observers.

Yan Xishan was known for making shows of disarming Japanese, only to rearm them at night.

Yan Xishan was so successful in convincing surrendered Japanese to work for him that as word spread to other areas of Northern China, Japanese soldiers from those areas began to converge on Taiyuan to serve his government and army.

At its greatest strength, the Japanese "special forces" under Yan Xishan totaled 15,000 troops, plus an officer corps that was distributed throughout Yan Xishan's army.

The initial skirmishes of the campaign were fought on 19 August 1945, when Yan Xishan dispatched 16,000 troops under Shi Zebo to capture the city of Changzhi, in southeastern Shanxi.

Yan Xishan was killed, and his army quickly surrendered en masse.

Yan Xishan observed that the Communists were growing stronger and predicted that within six months, they would rule half of China.

Yan Xishan repeatedly declared his intentions to die in the city during that period.

Yan Xishan mistakenly believed the leader of the arrested group, Jin Fu, was the high-ranking Communist leader Hu Yaobang, who the Nationalists believed was active in the region.

Yan Xishan airlifted the captured group to Chiang, who executed them after they had failed to produce important information.

Yan Xishan left behind Sun Chu as the commander of his military police force, with Yan's son-in-law, Wang Jingguo, in charge of most Nationalist forces.

Shortly after Yan Xishan had been airlifted out of Taiyuan, Nationalist planes stopped dropping food and supplies for the defenders for fear of being shot down by the advancing Communists.

In March 1949, Yan Xishan flew to the capital of Nanjing to ask the central government for more food and ammunition.

Yan Xishan had taken most of the provincial treasury with him and did not return before Taiyuan had fallen to Communist forces.

Shortly after arriving in Nanjing, Yan Xishan insinuated himself into a quarrel between the acting president of the Chinese Republic, Li Zongren, and Chiang Kai-shek, who had declared incapacity in January 1949.

Yan Xishan focused his efforts on attempting to promote greater co-operation between Li and Chiang.

Yan Xishan repeatedly used the example of the loss of Shanxi and warned that the Nationalist cause was doomed unless Li and Chiang's relationship improved.

Li went into exile in the United States, leaving Yan Xishan, who continued to serve as Premier in Taiwan, as the de facto leader of the Republic of China, until March 1950 when Chiang re-assumed the presidency.

Yan Xishan accompanied the central government to Sichuan and then Taiwan.

At one point, Yan Xishan requested permission to go to Japan, but was not allowed to leave Taiwan without relinquishing a large portion of his Shanxi wealth which he had taken during his flight from Taiyuan and invested abroad.

Yan Xishan was sincere about his attempts to modernize Shanxi and achieved success in some regards.

Yan Xishan was possibly the warlord most committed to his province in his era but was constantly challenged by his own dilettantism and the selfishness and the incompetence of his own officials.