Yan Xishan
Encyclopedia
Yan Xishan, (8 October 1883 – 22 July 1960) was a Chinese warlord
who served in the government of the Republic of China
. Yan effectively controlled the province of Shanxi
from the 1911 Xinhai Revolution
to the 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War
. As the leader of a relatively small, poor, remote province, Yan Xishan survived the machinations of Yuan Shikai
, the Warlord Era
, the Nationalist Era
, the Japanese invasion of China
, and the subsequent civil war
, being forced from office only when the Nationalist armies with which he was aligned had completely lost control of the Chinese mainland, isolating Shanxi from any source of economic or military supply. Yan 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.
. While studying at this school, Yan was first introduced to mathematics, physics, and various other subjects imported directly from the West. In 1904, Yan accompanied his class to Japan, where he was entered into the Imperial Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1909.
Yan eventually concluded that the Japanese had successfully modernized largely due to the Japanese government's abilities to mobilize its populace in support of its policies, and due to the close, respectful relationship that existed between the Japanese military and civilian populations. Yan attributed the surprising Japanese victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War
to the enthusiastic mobilization of the Japanese public in support of the Japanese military. After returning to China in 1909, Yan wrote a pamphlet warning China that his country was in danger of being overtaken by Japan unless they developed a local form of bushido
.
Even before studying in Japan, Yan had become disgusted with the open and widespread corruption of Qing officials in Shanxi, and had become convinced that China's relative helplessness in the nineteenth century was the result of the dynasty's general unprogressiveness and a grossly inept foreign policy. While he was in Japan, Yan Joined Sun Yat-sen
's Revolutionary Alliance
(Tongmenghui), and attempted to popularize Sun's ideology by organizing an affiliated "Blood and Iron Society" (鐵血償付團) within the Imperial Military Academy. The apparent goal of this student group was to organize a revolution that would lead to the creation of a strong and united China, similar to how Bismark
had created a strong and united Germany.
, Yan led local revolutionary forces to drive the Manchu forces from the province, proclaiming it independent of the Qing government. Yan justified his actions by attacking the Qing's failure to repel foreign aggression, and promised a wide range of social and political reforms.
from occupying most parts of Shanxi in 1913. During the period of Yuan's invasion, Yan was only able to survive by withdrawing northward and aligning himself with a friendly insurgent group in neighboring Shaanxi
province. By avoiding a decisive military confrontation with Yuan, Yan was able to preserve his own base of power. Though he was friends with Sun Yat-sen
, Yan withheld support for him in 1913, ingratiating himself to Yuan, who allowed Yan to return as military governor of Shanxi, commanding a military that was then staffed by Yuan's own henchmen. In 1917, shortly after Yuan Shikai
's death, Yan solidified his control over Shanxi
, ruling there uncontested. After Yuan's death in 1916, China descended into a period of warlordism.
The determination of Shanxi to resist Manchu rule was a factor leading Yuan himself to believe that only the abolition of the Qing dynasty could bring peace to China and end the civil war. Yan'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
, which was established after the end of the Qing dynasty
. The demonstrated futility of opposing Yuan's military domination can only have made it seem more important to Sun to bring Yuan into the process of ruling of the Republic, and to come to terms with his (potential) enemy.
. Instead of participating in the ongoing civil wars, Yan devoted himself almost exclusively to modernizing Shanxi and developing its resources. The success of his reforms were sufficient for him to be dubbed by outsiders as the "Model Governor", with Shanxi the "Model Province".
Yan's determination to modernize Shanxi was mostly inspired from his experiences in Japan, but also by his experiences with foreign doctors and personnel who arrived in Shanxi in 1918 in order to help Yan suppress an epidemic which was ravaging the province. Yan was impressed with the zeal, talents, and modern outlook of these personnel, and subsequently compared foreigners favorably to his own conservative and generally apathetic officials. Conversations with other famous reformers, including John Dewey
, Hu Shih
, and Yan's close friend H. H. Kung
, reinforced Yan's determination to Westernize Shanxi.
, Yan allied himself with the forces of Chiang Kai-shek
in 1927, during the Nationalist's Northern Expedition. While aiding Chiang, Yan's occupation of Beijing in June, 1928, brought the Northern Expedition to a successful conclusion. Yan's assistance to Chiang was rewarded shortly afterwards by his being named Minister of the Interior and deputy commander-in-chief of all Kuomintang armies
to oppose the Nationalists in northern China. While Feng and Chiang's armies were annihilating each other, Yan marched virtually unopposed through Shandong, capturing the provincial capital in June, 1930. After these victories, Yan attempted to forge a new national government, with himself as President, by calling an "Enlarged Party Conference". This conference attempted to draft a national constitution and involved the participation of numerous high-ranking Chinese militarists and politicians, including Wang Jingwei
(who was to serve as Yan's Prime Minister) and Li Zongren
. These deliberations were deliberately interrupted by Chiang Kai-shek
who, after decisively defeating Feng's armies, invaded Shandong and virtually annihilated Yan's army. When the governor of Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang
, publicly declared his allegiance to Chiang (whose support Zhang required in order to contest the Russians and Japanese), Yan fled to Dalian
in Manchuria
, only returning to an unconquered Shanxi after making peace with Chiang in 1931. During this "Central Plains War
", the Kuomintang
encouraged Muslims and Mongols to overthrow both Feng Yuxiang
and Yan. Chiang's defeat of Yan and Feng in 1930 is considered the end of China's Warlord Era
.
The events between 1927 and 1931 are best explained as the strategies of warlords accustomed to the constantly shifting, chaotic alliances which had characterized Chinese politics since the breakdown of the central government a decade earlier. The main cause of Yan's defeat was the low population and lack of development in the areas that Yan had under his control, making him incapable of fielding a large and well-equipped army similar to the armies commanded by Chiang at the time. Yan was also unable to match the quality of leadership in Chiang's officer corps and the prestige that Chiang and the Nationalist army possessed at the time. Before Chiang's armies defeated Feng and Yan, Yan Xishan appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine
, including the subtitle "China's Next President." The attention given to him by foreign observers in this period, and the support and assistance that he had secured from other high-profile Chinese statesmen, implies that there was a credible expectation that Yan would lead a central government if Chiang failed to defeat Yan's alliance.
, who had marched up to northern Hunan
from his base in Guangxi
in support of Yan.
Yan 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 and his followers an opportunity to informally overthrow the Kuomintang in Shanxi. In December 18, 1931, a group of students (supported and perhaps orchestrated by officials loyal to Yan) gathered in Taiyuan to protest the Nanjing government's policy of not fighting the Japanese. This demonstration became so violent that Kuomintang police fired into the crowd. The outrage that this "Massacre of December Eighteenth" generated was strong enough that it gave Yan's officials a pretext to expel the Kuomintang from the province, on the grounds of public safety. After this event the Kuomintang ceased to exist in Shanxi except as a dummy organization whose members were more loyal to Yan Xishan than to Chiang Kai-shek.
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 retain the title of Pacification Commissioner in 1932, and he appointed Yan to the central government's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission
. In 1934 Chiang finally flew to Taiyuan, where he praised Yan's administration in return for Yan's public support for Nanjing. By publicly praising Yan's government, Chiang in effect admitted that Yan remained the undisputed ruler of Shanxi.
was violently arrested by Nationalist officers led by Zhang Xueliang
, and released only when Chiang agreed to make peace with the Communists and form a "united front" to resist the impending Japanese invasion of China. In his correspondence with Zhang Xueliang
in 1936, Yan indicated that the growing rift between Yan and Chiang was due to Yan's anxieties over the potential for a Japanese invasion and a concern for the subsequent fate of China, and because Yan was not convinced of the correctness of focusing China's resources on anti-Communist campaigns. During the Xian Incident itself, Yan actively involved himself in the negotiations, sending representatives to prevent Chiang's execution (and the civil war that Yan believed would follow), while pushing for a united front to resist the Japanese invasion of China that Yan believed was imminent.
The financial relationship between Shanxi and the central government remained complicated. Yan 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 Kai-shek. Despite his measured successes in modernizing the industry of Shanxi, Yan repeatedly petitioned the central government for financial assistance in order to extend the local railroad, and for other reasons, but was generally refused. When Yan 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: due to these artificially low salt prices, neighboring provinces virtually stopped purchasing Shanxi salt altogether. 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 had announced several years before.
Yan attempted to develop his army as a locally recruited force which cultivated a public image of being servants, rather than masters, of the people. He developed an all-encompassing, idiosyncratic ideology (literally "Yan Xishan Thought") and disseminated it by sponsoring a network of villiage newspapers and travelling dramatic troupes. He coordinated dramatic public meetings in which participants confessed their own misdeeds and/or denounced those of others. He 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 devised and implemented these reforms (during the Warlord Era) contradicts later claims that these reforms were modeled on Communist programs, and not vice versa.
and Yan's defeat in Henan
in 1919 caused Yan to reassess the value of militarism as a way of life. Yan then decreased the size of the army until 1923 (in order to save money), until a rumor circulated that rival warlords were planning on invading Shanxi. Yan then introduced military reforms designed to train a rural militia of 100,000 men along the lines of Japanese and American reserves.
Yan attempted, via conscription, to create a civilian reserve that would become the foundation of society in Shanxi. Because his troops were perhaps the only army in the Warlord era drawn exclusively from the province in which they were stationed, because Yan insisted that his soldiers perform work to improve Shanxi's infrastructure, including road-maintenance and assisting farmers, and because Yan's 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 rival's armies in China.
Yan's officer corps was drawn from Shanxi's gentry, and given two years of education at government expense. Despite efforts to subject his officers to a rigorous, Japanese-style training regimen, and to indocrinate them in Yan Xishan Thought, his armies never proved to be especially well-trained or disciplined in battle. In general, Yan's record of military defeats is not considered positive, and it is unclear whether Yan's officer corps either understood or sympathized with Yan's objectives, instead entering his service solely in the interests of achieving prestige and a higher standard of living. Yan built an arsenal in Taiyuan that, for the entire period of his administration, remained the only center in China capable of producing field artillery. The presence of this arsenal was one of the main reasons that Yan was able to maintain Shanxi's relative independence. While not effective fighting rival warlords, Yan's army was successful in eradicating banditry in Shanxi, allowing Yan to maintain a relatively high level of public order and security. Yan's successes in eradicating banditry in Shanxi include his cooperation with Yuan Shikai to defeat Bai Lang's remnant rebels after the failed 1913-1914 Bai Lang Rebellion
.
Yan attempted to eradicate the custom of footbinding, threatening to sentence men who married women with bound feet, and mothers who bound their daughters' feet, to hard labour in state-run factories. He discouraged the use of the traditional lunar calendar and encouraged the development of local boy scout organizations. Like the Communists who later succeeded Yan, he punished habitual lawbreakers to "redemption through labour" in state-run factories.
Yan's attempts to suppress the opium trade in Shanxi were largely successful, and the number of opium addicts in the province was reduced by 80% by 1922. In the absence of efforts by other warlords to combat opium production and trade, Yan's efforts to combat opium use only increased the price of opium so high that narcotics of all kinds were drawn into Shanxi from other provinces. Users often switched from opium to pills mixed from morphine and heroin, which were easier to smuggle and use. Because the most influential and powerful gentry in Shanxi were often the worst offenders, officials drawn from the privileged class of Shanxi seldom enforced Yan's decrees outlawing the use of narcotics, and often evaded punishment themselves. Eventually Yan was forced to abandon his efforts to suppress opium trafficking, and attempted instead to establish a government monopoly on the production and sale of opium in Shanxi. Yan continued to complain about the availability of narcotics into the 1930s, and after 1932 executed over 600 people caught smuggling drugs into Shanxi. The traffic persisted, but Yan's interests in opposing it were perhaps limited by a fear of provoking the Japanese, who manufactured most of the morphine and heroin available in China inside their concession area in Tianjin
, and who came to control much of the drug trade in northern China in the 1930s.
and Social Darwinism
, but he renounced these after World War I. Throughout the rest of Yan's life, he identified with the position of most Chinese conservatives at the time: that social and economic reform would progress from ethical reform, and that the problems confronting China could only be solved by the moral rehabilitation of the Chinese people. Believing that no single ideology existed to unify the Chinese people at the time that he came to power, Yan attempted to generate an ideal ideology himself, and once boasted that he had succeeded in creating a comprehensive system of belief that embodied the best features of "militarism, nationalism, anarchism, democracy, capitalism, communism, individualism, imperialism, universalism, paternalism, and utopianism". Much of Yan's attempts to spread his ideology were through a network of semi-religious organizations known as "Heart-Washing Societies".
by virtue of his upbringing, and because he identified its values as a historically effective solution to the chaos and disorder of his time. Yan justified his rule via Confucian political theories, and attempted to revive Confucianism virtues as being universally accepted. In his speeches and writing Yan developed an extravagant admiration for the virtues of moderation and harmony associated with the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean
. Many of the reforms that Yan attempted were undertaken with the intention of demonstrating that he was a junzi, the epitome of Confucian virtue.
Yan's interpretations of Confucianism were mostly borrowed from the form of Neo-Confucianism
that was popular in the Qing dynasty. He taught that everyone had a capacity for innate goodness, but that in order to fulfill this capacity people had to subordinate their emotions and desires to the control of their conscience. He admired the Ming dynasty
philosophers Lu Jiuyuan
and Wang Yangming
, who disparaged knowledge and who urged men to act on the basis of their intuition. Because Yan believed that human beings could only achieve their potentials through intense self-criticism and self-cultivation, Yan established in every town a Heart-Washing Society, whose members gathered each Sunday to meditate and listen to sermons based on the themes of the Confucian classics. Everyone at these meetings was supposed to rise and confess aloud his misdeeds of the past week, inviting criticism from the other members.
) to educate and modernize Shanxi. Yan regularly addressed the graduating classes of these schools, but was generally unsuccessful in recruiting these students to serve his regime. Yan supported the indigenous Christian church in Taiyuan, and at one time seriously considered using Christian chaplains in his army. Yan's public support of Christianity waned after 1925, when he failed to come to the defense of Christians during anti-foreigner and anti-Christian demonstrations that polarized Taiyuan.
Yan deliberately organized many features of his Heart-Washing Society on the Christian church, including ending each service with hymns praising Confucius. Yan urged his subjects to place their faith in a supreme being that he called "Shangdi": he justified his belief in Shangdi via the Confucian classics, but described Shangdi in terms very similar to the Christian interpretation of God. Like Christianity, Yan Xishan Thought was permeated with the belief that, through accepting his ideology, people could become regenerated or reborn.
Yan attempted to moderate some aspects of Sun Yat-sen
's ideology that he viewed as potentially threatening to his rule. Yan altered some of Sun's doctrines before disseminating them in Shanxi, 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. During the 1919 May Fourth Movement
, when students in Taiyuan staged anti-foreign demonstrations, Yan warned that patriotism, like rainfall, was beneficial only when moderate.
After the Kuomintang
succeeded in forming a nominal central government in 1930, Yan encouraged Nationalist principles that he viewed as socially beneficial. During the 1930s Yan attempted to set up in every village a "Good People's Movement" in order to promote the values of Chiang Kai-shek
's New Life Movement
. These values included honesty, friendliness, dignity, diligence, modesty, thrift, personal neatness, and obedience.
Yan's speeches after 1931 reflect an interpretation of Marxist economics (mostly drawn from Das Kapital
) that Yan gained while in exile in Dalian. Following this interpretation, Yan attempted to change the economy of Shanxi to become more like that of the USSR, inspiring a scheme of economic "distribution according to labour". When the threat of Chinese Communists became a significant threat to Yan's rule, Yan defended the Communists as courageous and self-sacrificing fanatics who were different from common bandits (contrary to Kuomintang propaganda) and whose challenge must be met by social and economic reforms that alleviated the conditions responsible for communism.
Like Marx
, Yan wanted to eliminate what he saw as unearned profit by restructuring Shanxi's economy to reward only those who worked. Unlike Marx, Yan reinterpreted Communism to correct what he believed was Marxism
's chief flaw: the inevitability of class warfare. Yan 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. By rejecting economic determinism in favor of morality and free will, Yan hoped to create a society that was more productive and less violent than communism, while avoiding the exploitation and human misery that he believed was the inevitable result of capitalism.
Yan interpreted Roosevelt's
New Deal
as promoting socialism in order to combat the spread of communism. "The New Deal is an effective way of stopping communism," Yan said, "by having the government step in and ride roughshod over the interests of the rich." Yan then undertook a series of public works projects inspired by the New Deal in order to reduce unemployment in his own province.
, and feigned collaboration with the Japanese in order to pressure Chiang Kai-shek into allowing Yan to return to Shanxi before warning Chiang of Japan's intent. Japan's subsequent success in taking Manchuria in 1931 terrified Yan, who stated that a major objective of his Ten Year Plan was to strengthen Shanxi's defense against the Japanese. In the early 1930s Yan supported anti-Japanese riots, denounced the Japanese occupation of Manchuria as "barbarous" and "evil", publicly appealed to Chiang to send troops to Manchuria, and arranged for his arsenal to arm partisans fighting the Japanese occupation in Manchuria.
In December 1931 Yan 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. In order to prevent this Yan took control of Suiyuan first, developing Suiyuan's large iron deposits (24% of all iron in China), and settling the province with thousands of soldier-farmers. When Manchurian soldiers (armed and led by the Japanese) finally invaded Chahar in 1935, Yan virtually declared war on the Japanese by accepting a position as "advisor" of the Suiyuan Mongolian Political Council, an organization created by the central government to organize Mongolian opposition to the Japanese.
The Japanese began promoting "autonomy" for northern China in the summer of 1935. Apparently, many high-ranking Japanese in China believed that Yan and many others in the north were fundamentally pro-Japanese, and would readily subordinate themselves to the Japanese in exchange for protection from Chiang Kai-shek. Yan published an open letter in September in which he accused the Japanese of desiring to conquer all of China over the next two decades. According to Japanese sources, Yan entered into negotiations with the Japanese in 1935, but was never very enthusiastic about "autonomy" and rejected their overtures when he realized that they intended to make him their puppet. Yan likely used these negotiations to frighten Chiang Kai-shek into using his armies to defend Shanxi, since he was afraid that Chiang was preparing to sacrifice northern China to avoid fighting the Japanese. If these were Yan's intentions, they were successful, as Chiang assured Yan that he would defend Shanxi with his army in the event that Shanxi was invaded.
, organized the gentry and village authorities into anti-corruption and anti-communist political organizations, and attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to undertake a large-scale programme of land reform.
These reforms did not prevent the spread of Communist guerilla operations into Shanxi. Led by Liu Zhidan and Xu Haidong
, 34,000 Communist troops crossed into southwestern Shanxi in February 1936. As Yan predicted, the Communists enjoyed massive popular support; and, although they were outnumbered and ill-armed, succeeded in occupying the southern third of Shanxi in less than a month. The Communists' strategy of guerilla warfare was extremely effective against, and demoralizing for, Yan's forces, who repeatedly fell victim to surprise attacks. The Communists in Shanxi made good use of cooperation supplied by local peasants to evade and easily locate Yan's forces. When reinforcements sent by the central government forced the Communists to withdraw from Shanxi, the Red Army escaped by splitting into small groups that were actively supplied and hidden by local supporters. Yan himself admitted that his forces had fought poorly during the campaign. The KMT forces that remained in Shanxi expressed hostility to Yan's rule, but did not interfere with his governance.
troops occupying the Inner Mongolian province of Chahar invaded northeastern Suiyuan, which Yan controlled. These Japanese-aligned troops seized the city of Bailingmiao in northern Suiyuan, where the pro-Japanese Inner Mongolian Autonomous Political Council maintained its headquarters. Three months later, the head of the Political Council, Prince Teh (Demchugdongrub)
declared that he was the ruler of an independent Mongolia (Mengguguo
), and organized an army with the aid of Japanese equipment and training. In August 1936 Prince Teh's army attempted to invade eastern Suiyuan, but it was defeated by Yan's forces under the command of Fu Zuoyi
. Following this defeat, Prince Teh planned another invasion while Japanese agents carefully sketched and photographed Suiyuan's defenses.
To prepare for the imminent threat of Japanese invasion that Yan felt after Suiyuan was invaded, Yan attempted to force all students to undergo several months of compulsive military training, and formed an informal alliance with the Communists for the purpose of fighting the Japanese, several months before the Xi'an Incident
Compelled Chiang Kai-shek to do the same. In November 1936 the army of Prince Teh presented Fu Zuoyi with an ultimatum to surrender. When Fu responded that Prince Teh was merely a puppet of "certain quarters" and requested that Teh submit to the authority of the central government, Prince Teh's Mongolian and Manchurian armies launched another, more ambitious attack. Teh's 15,000 soldiers were armed with Japanese weapons, supported by Japanese aircraft, and often led by Japanese officers. (Japanese soldiers fighting for Mengguguo were often executed after their capture as illegal combatants, since Mengguguo was not recognized as being part of Japan).
In anticipation of this war, Japanese spies destroyed a large supply depot in Datong
and carried out other acts of sabotage. Yan placed his best troops and most able generals, including Zhao Chengshou
and Yan's son-in-law, Wang Jingguo
, under the command of Fu Zuoyi. During the month of fighting that ensued, the army or Mengguguo suffered severe casualties. Fu's forces succeeded in occupying Bailingmiao on November 24, 1936, and was considering invading Chahar before he was warned by the Kwangtung Army that doing so would provoke an attack by the Japanese Army. Prince Teh's forces repeatedly attempted to retake Bailingmiao, but this only provoked Fu into sending troops north, where he successfully seized the last of Teh's bases in Suiyuan and virtually annihilated his army. After Japanese were found to be aiding Teh, Yan publicly accused Japan of aiding the invaders. Yan's victories in Suiyuan over Japanese-backed forces were praised by Chinese newspapers and magazines, other warlords and political leaders, and many students and members of the Chinese public.
(1937–1945), most regions of Shanxi were quickly overrun by the Japanese
, but Yan refused to flee the province after losing the provincial capital, Taiyuan. He relocated his headquarters to a remote corner of the province, effectively resisting Japanese attempts to completely seize Shanxi. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese made no less than five attempts to negotiate peace terms with Yan and hoped that Yan would become a second Wang Jingwei
, but Yan refused and stayed on the Chinese side.
provoked the Japanese into attacking Chinese forces in and around Beijing, the Japanese sent a large amount of warplanes and Manchurian soldiers to reinforce Prince Teh's army. This caused Yan to believe that a Japanese invasion of Shanxi was imminent, and he flew to Nanjing to communicate the situation to Chiang Kai-shek. Yan left his meeting in Nanjing with an appointment as commander of the Second War Zone, comprising Shanxi, Suiyuan, Chahar, and northern Shaanxi.
After returning to Shanxi, Yan encouraged his officials to be suspicious of enemy spies and hanjian
, and ordered his forces to attack Prince Teh's forces in northern Chahar, hoping to surprise and overwhelm them quickly. The Mongolian and Manchu forces were quickly routed, and Japanese reinforcements attempted to force their way through the strategic Nankou pass suffered heavy casualties. Overwhelming Japanese firepower, including artillery, bombers, and tanks, eventually forced Yan's forces to surrender Nankou, after which Japanese forces quickly seized Suiyuan and Datong. The Japanese then began the invasion of Shanxi in earnest.
As the Japanese advanced southward into Taiyuan basin, Yan attempted to impose discipline on his army by executing General Li Fuying and other officers guilty of retreating from the enemy. He issued orders not to withdraw or 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. In the face of continued Japanese advances Yan apologized to the central government for his army's defeats, asked it to assume responsibility for the defense of Shanxi, and agreed to share control of the provincial government with one of Chiang Kai-shek's representatives.
became the commander of the Eighth Route Army
active in Shanxi and was named the vice-commander of the Second War Zone, under Yan himself. Agents working under Zhou Enlai
set up a headquarters in Taiyuan. Yan initially responded warmly to the re-entry of the arrival of Communist forces, and they were greeted with enthusiasm by Yan's officials and officers.
Communist forces arrived in Shanxi just in time to help defeat a decisively more powerful Japanese force attempting to move through the strategic mountain pass of Pingxingguan
. After the Japanese responded to this defeat by outflanking the defenders and moving towards Taiyuan, the Communists avoided decisive battles and mostly attempted to harass Japanese forces and sabotage Japanese lines of supply and communication. The Japanese suffered, but mostly ignored the Eighth Route Army and continued to advance towards Yan's capital. The lack of attention directed at their forces gave the Communists time to recruit and propagandize among the local peasant populations (who generally welcomed Communist forces enthusiastically) and to organize a network of militia units, local guerilla bands, and popular mass organizations.
Genuine Communist efforts to resist the Japanese gave them the authority to carry out sweeping and radical social and economic reforms, mostly related to land and wealth redistribution, which they defended by labeling those who resisted as hanjian
. Communist efforts to resist the Japanese also won over Shanxi's small population of patriotic intellectuals, and conservative fears of resisting them effectively gave the Communists unlimited access to the rural population. Subsequent atrocities committed by the Japanese in the effort to rid Shanxi of Communist guerillas aroused the hatred of millions in the Shanxi countryside, causing the rural population to turn to the Communists for leadership against the Japanese. All of these factors explain how, within a year of re-entering Shanxi, the Communists were able to take control of most of Shanxi not firmly held by the Japanese
Shanxi troops successfully resisted numerous Japanese assaults while the Eight Route Army harassed the Japanese from the rear and along their flanks. Other units of Yan's army successfully defended other nearby passes. After the Japanese successfully broke into the Taiyan basin, the Japanese continued to encounter ferocious resistance. At Yuanping
, a single brigade of Yan's troops held out against the entire Japanese advance for over a week, allowing reinforcements sent by the central government to take up defensive positions at Xinkou
. The Communist generals Zhu De and Peng Dehuai
criticized Yan for what they called "suicidal tactics", but Yan was confident that the heavy losses suffered by the Japanese would eventually demoralize them, forcing the Japanese to abandon their effort to take Shanxi.
During the Battle of Xinkou
, the Chinese defenders resisted the efforts of Japan's Itakagi Division for over a month, despite Japanese advantages in artillery and air support. By the end of October, 1937, Japan's losses were four times greater than those suffered at Pingxingguan, and the Itakagi Division was close to defeat. Contemporary Communist accounts called the battle "the most fierce in North China", while Japanese accounts called the battle a "stalemate". In an effort to save their forces at Xinkou, Japanese forces began an effort to occupy Shanxi from a second direction, in the east. After a week of fighting, Japanese forces captured the strategic Niangzi Pass, opening the way to capturing Taiyuan. Communist guerilla tactics were ineffective in slowing down the Japanese advance. The defenders at Xinkou, realizing that they were in danger of being outflanked, withdrew southward, past Taiyuan, leaving a small force of 6,000 men to hold off the entire Japanese army. A representative of the Japanese army, speaking of the final defense of Taiyuan
, said that "nowhere in China have the Chinese fought so obstinately".
The Japanese suffered 30,000 dead and an equal number wounded in the effort to take northern Shanxi. A Japanese study found that the battles of Pingxingguan, Xinkou, and Taiyuan were responsible for over half of all casualties suffered by the Japanese army in North China. Yan himself was forced to withdraw after having 90% of his army destroyed, including a large force of reinforcements sent into Shanxi by the central government. Throughout 1937 numerous high-ranking Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong
, lavished praise on Yan for waging an uncompromising campaign of resistance against the Japanese.
, in southwestern Shanxi. Japanese forces halted their advance in order to focus on combating Communist guerilla unts still active in their territory, and communicated to Yan that they would exterminate his forces within a year, but that he and his supporters would be treated with consideration if they severed relations with the central government and assisted the Japanese in suppressing the Communists. Yan responded by repeating his promise not to surrender until Japan had been defeated. Possibly because of the severity of his losses in northern Shanxi, Yuan abandoned a plan of defense based on positional warfare, and began to reform his army as a force capable of waging guerilla warfare. After 1938 most of Yan's followers came to refer to his regime as a "guerilla administration".
Yan's intransigence obliged the Japanese to invade Linfen. Yan's defenses, under the command of Wei Lihuang, put up a stiff defense at Lingshi Pass, but were eventually forced to abandon the position when a Japanese column broke through a different pass and threatened Linfen from the east. Wei was successful in preventing the Japanese from seizing the strategic Zhongtiao mountain range
, but the loss of Linfen and Lingshi forced Yan to withdraw with what remained of his army across the Yellow River
, into neighboring Shaanxi.
In the spring of 1938 the Japanese redistributed many of their forces away from Shanxi, and Yan succeeded in re-establishing his authority, setting up a headquarters in the remote, mountainous district of Qixian
. The Japanese made several raids into southern Shanxi, but withdrew after encountering heavy resistance. By 1938, Yan's tactics had evolved to resemble the guerilla warfare practiced by Communist forces in other parts of Shanxi, and his defenses featured coordination with Communist forces and with regular divisions of the Nationalist army.
Yan's alliance with the Communists eventually suffered as tensions escalated between the KMT and CCP in other parts of China. Yan himself eventually came to fear the rapid power and influence that Communist forces operating in Shanxi quickly gained, and this fear caused Yan to become increasingly hostile to Communist agents and soldiers. These tensions eventually led to the breakdown of Yan's good relations with the Communists in 1939, when Yan began another offensive against the Japanese and attempted to wipe out the units of his army most friendly with the Communists by having them do most of the fighting. These units eventually rebelled against Yan, receiving assistance from the Communists, while soldiers aligned with the central government aided Yan. Yan eventually succeeded in driving the Communists and their sympathizers from the territory that he controlled, but most of the rural territory of northwestern Shanxi passed into the control of the Eighth Route Army. Yan's forces continued to battle the Japanese throughout 1940 as part of an indecisive guerilla campaign.
, became chief of staff of the Japanese First Army, which was stationed in Shanxi. After Yan's animosity with the Communists became apparent, Tanaka began negotiations with Yan in the effort of inducing Yan to enter into an anti-Communist alliance with Japan. Yan agreed to send a high-level representative to meet with the Japanese, and obtained permission from the central government to negotiate with the Japanese for an agreement to remove all troops from Shanxi in exchange for Yan's cooperation. Perhaps because the Japanese were unwilling to meet these demands, Yan withdrew from negotiations in December, 1940, when Tanaka's superiors recalled him to Japan. Two months later the Japanese repeated their charge that Yan was a "dupe" of the Communists.
In May 1941 Tanaka Ryukichi returned to Shanxi and reopened negotiations with Yan, despite a general resistance from other Japanese military leaders in North China. Tanaka returned to Tokyo in August 1941, paving way for talks between Yan and General Iwamatsu, then the commander of the Japanese First Army in Shanxi. In the summer of 1942 Yan told the Japanese that he would aid them in their fight against the Communists if the Japanese withdrew a large part of their forces from Shanxi and provided his army with food, weapons, and CH$15 million of precious metals.
When Iwamatsu sent his chief of staff, General Hanatani, to Qixian for the purpose of delivering what Yan demanded, Yan called the Japanese concessions inadequate and refused to negotiate with the Japanese. This refusal is variously explained as Yan's resentment over the arrogance of the Japanese, his conviction that the Japanese would lose the war in the Pacific after he heard about the Battle of Midway
, and/or the result of a translation error that convinced Yan that the Japanese were using the negotiations as a ploy to ambush and attack him by surprise. Because they had allowed Yan to deceive them, Iwamatsu lost his command and Hanatani was reassigned to the Pacific.
After 1943 the Japanese began to negotiate with Yan clandestinely through civilian representatives (notably Yan's friend, Komoto Daisaku) in an effort to avoid being humiliated by him. Through Komoto's efforts Yan and the Japanese came to observe and informal ceasefire, though the terms of this agreement are unknown. By 1944 Yan's troops were actively battling the Communists, possibly with the cooperation and assistance of the Japanese. Yan's relationship with Chiang also declined by 1944, when Yan warned that the masses would turn to communism if Chiang's government did not improve considerably. An American reporter who visited Shanxi in 1944 observed that Yan "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 was successful in keeping the presence of the Japanese from American and Nationalist observers. He was known for making shows of disarming Japanese, only to rearm them at night. In one instance, he disarmed several units of Japanese, had a reporter take a picture of the stacked weapons to show that he was following orders, and then gave the weapons back to the Japanese. He once officially labelled a detachment of Japanese troops as "railway repair labourers" in public records before sending them, fully armed, into areas without railway tracks but full of Communist insurgents.
By recruiting the Japanese into his service in the manner that he did, Yan retained both the extensive industrial complex around Taiyuan and virtually all of the managerial and technical personnel employed by the Japanese to run it. Yan was so successful in convincing surrendered Japanese to work for him that, as word spread to other areas of north 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 totalled 15,000 troops, plus an officer corps that was distributed throughout Yan's army. These numbers were reduced to 10,000 after serious American efforts to repatriate the Japanese were partially successful. By 1949, serious casualties had reduced the number of Japanese soldiers under Yan's command to 3,000. The leader of the Japanese under Yan's command, Imamura Hosaku, committed suicide on the day that Taiyuan fell to Communist forces.
, Yan's troops (including thousands of former Japanese troops) held out against the Communists during the Chinese Civil War
for four years. His forces held out until April, 1949, after the Nationalist government had lost control northern China, allowing the PLA to encircle and besiege his forces. The area surrounding the provincial capital of Taiyuan was the longest to resist Communist control.
was an attempt by Yan (authorized by Chiang Kai-shek
) to re-assert control over southern Shanxi, where the People's Liberation Army
was known to be especially active. The total forces sent by Yan into southern Shanxi consisted of 35,000 of his provincial troops. The PLA contested this force with approximately 31,000 regular PLA troops, and were able to supplement this force with approximately 50,000 irregular militia soldiers, which were used mainly for logistical support and to maintain low-level suppression activities against already besieged (and stationary) forces. Yan's forces in general were much better armed and supplied than the forces fielded by the PLA at the time.
The PLA forces were led by Liu Bocheng
(later named one of the "Ten Great Marshals of the People's Republic of China"). Deng Xiaoping
, China's future leader, served as Liu's political commisar. Yan's forces were initially led by Shi Zebo, and were later reinforced by Peng Yubin
.
Hostilities began on September 10, 1945. After initial engagements between Shi Zebo and Liu Bocheng's forces, Shi barricaded his forces inside the regional center of Chengzhi. Liu's army occupied the area surrounding Chengzhi, but was not able to take the city, leading to a stalemate. Peng Yubin's forces were sent to reinforce Liu's position. Peng was initially successful in defeating PLA detachments, but eventually his forces were led into an ambush, and were completely lost. During this time, Shi's forces attempted a breakout from Chengzhi, but were also ambushed and defeated on October 12, 1945.
Most of the PLA casualties in the campaign ooccurred when they attempted to confront Peng's reinforcements in an orthodox battle, allowing Yan's forces to successfully target Liu's forces with their superior arms. After these tactics failed, PLA forces were able to kill or capture both Shi and Peng's forces by leading them each into a series of well-orchestrated ambushes. Although both forces suffered the same amount of dead or wounded, 4,000-5,000, the Communists were able to capture 31,000 of Yan's troops, who surrendered once they fell into these ambushes. Of Yan's commanders, Peng Yubin was killed in action and Shi Zebo was taken alive as a prisoner of war.
The Shangdang Campaign ended with the Communists in firm control of southern Shanxi. Because the army fielded by Yan was much better supplied and armed, the victory allowed the local PLA to acquire much greater arms than had previously been available to them (including, for the first time, field artillery). It is said that the PLA victory in the Shangdang campaign altered the course of the ongoing Chongqing peace negotiations, allowing Mao Zedong
to act from a stronger negotiating position. Their victory in the Shangdang campaign boosted the long-term prestige of both Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping.
By the winter of 1947 Yan's control of Shanxi was restricted to the area of northern Shanxi adjacent to Taiyuan. Yan observed that the Communists were growing stronger, and predicted that within six months they would rule half of China. After losing southern Shanxi Yan undertook preparations to defend Taiyuan to the death, perhaps in the hopes that if he and other anti-Communist leaders could hold out long enough the United States would eventually join the war on their side, saving his forces from destruction.
To overcome these defenses, Xu Xiangqian
developed a strategy of engaging positions on the outskirts of Taiyuan before besieging the city itself. The first hostilities in the Taiyuan Campaign occurred on October 5, 1948.
By November 13, 1948, the Communists succeeded in taking the area around the eastern side of Taiyuan. The Nationalists suffered serious setbacks when entire divisions defected or surrendered. In one case, a Nationalist division led by Dai Bingnan pretended to surrender, but then arrested the Communist officers who entered Dai's camp to accept. Yan Xishan mistakenly believed the Communist leader of the arrested group, Jin Fu, was Hu Yaobang
. Yen airlifted the captured group to Chiang Kai-shek, who executed them after they failed to produce important information. Dai himself was rewarded with a large amount of gold for his actions, but was not allowed to be airlifted out of Taiyuan. After the city fell, he was captured, put on a well-propagandized show trial, and publicly executed.
Between November, 1948, and April, 1949, a stalemate was reached and there was little advancement by either side. Tactics used by the Communists during this time included psychological warfare, forcing relatives of the Nationalist defenders to the front to ask for the defenders' surrender. These tactics were successful as, from December 1, 1948, through March, 1949, over 12,000 Nationalist soldiers surrendered.
After major PLA victories in Hebei in late January, 1949
, Communist armies in Shanxi were reinforced with additional troops and artillery. After this reinforcement, the total number of men under Liu's command exceeded 320,000 men, of which 220,000 were reserves. By the end of 1948, Yan Xishan had lost over 40,000 troops, but attempted to supplement this number through large-scale drafting.
Yan Xishan himself (along with most of the provincial treasury) was airlifted out of Taiyuan on March 1949 for the express purpose of asking the central government for more supplies. Yan 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. Overall command was delegated to Imamura Hosaku, the Japanese lieutenant-general who had joined Yan after World War II.
Shortly after Yan himself was airlifted out of Taiyuan, Nationalist planes stopped dropping food and supplies for the defenders due to fears of being shot down by the advancing Communists. The Communists, depending largely on their reinforcements of artillery, launched a major assault on April 20, 1949, and succeeded in taking all positions surrounding Taiyuan by April 22. A subsequent appeal to the defenders to surrender was refused. On the morning of April 22, 1949, the PLA bombarded Taiyuan with 1,300 pieces of artillery and breached the city's walls, initiating bloody street-to-street fighting for control of the city. By 10:00 am, April 22, the Taiyuan Campaign ended with the Communists in complete control of Shanxi. Total Nationalist casualties amounted to all 145,000 defenders, many of which survived as POWs. The Communists lost 45,000 men and an unknown number of civilian labourers that they had drafted, all of which were either killed or injured.
The fall of Taiyuan was one of the few examples in the Chinese Civil War in which Nationalist forces echoed the defeated Ming loyalists who had, in the seventeenth century, brought entire cities to ruins resisting the invading Manchus. Many Nationalist officers were reported to have committed suicide when the city fell. The dead included Yan's nephew-in-law, who was serving as governor, and his cousin, who ran his household. Liang Huazhi
, the head of Yan's "Patriotic Sacrifice League", had fought for years against the Communists in Shanxi until he was finally trapped in the massively fortified city of Taiyuan. For six months Liang led a savage resistance, leading both Yan's remaining forces and those of the warlord's thousands of Japanese mercenaries. When Communist troops finally broke into the city and began to occupy large sections of it, Liang barricaded himself inside a large, fortified prison complex filled with Communist prisoners. In a final act of self-sacrifice, Liang set fire to the prison and committed suicide as the entire compound burned to the ground.
, and Chiang Kai-shek, who had resigned from the presidency in January 1949. Although Chiang had resigned, many officials and generals remained loyal to him, and Chiang retained over US$200 million, which he did not allow Li to use in order to fight the Communists or to stabilize the currency. The ongoing power struggle between Li and Chiang seriously disrupted the larger effort to defend Nationalist territory from Communist forces.
Yan focused his efforts on attempting to promote greater cooperation between Li an Chiang. On one occasion Yan broke down in tears when attempting, at Chiang's request, to convince Li not to resign. He 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 eventually attempted to form a government, including both Chiang's supporters and critics, with Yan as premier. Despite Yan's efforts, Chiang refused to allow Li access to more than a fraction of the wealth that Chiang had sent to Taiwan, and officers loyal to Chiang refused to follow Li's orders, frustrating efforts to coordinate Nationalist defenses and to stabilize the currency.
By late 1949 the Nationalist's position had become desperate. The currency issued by the central government rapidly declined in value until it became virtually worthless. Military forces loyal to Li attempted to defend Guangdong
and Guangxi
, while those loyal to Chiang attempted to defend Sichuan
. Both forces refused to cooperate with each other, eventually leading to the loss of both regions. Yan's constant attempts to work with both sides led to his being alienated from both Li and Chiang, both of whom resented Yan for cooperating with either side. The Communists succeeded in taking all territory held on the mainland by the end of 1949, defeating both Li and Chiang. Li went into exile in the United States, while Yan continued to serve as Premier, in Taiwan, until 1950, when Chiang re-assumed the presidency.
Yan was deserted by all but a handful of followers, and spent most of his remaining years writing books on philosophy, history, and contemporary events, which he frequently had translated into English. Yan's late philosophical perspective has been described as "anti-communist and anti-capitalist Confucian utopianism". Several months before the Korean War
Yan published a book, Peace or World War, in which he predicted that North Korea
would invade South Korea
, that South Korea would be quickly overcome, that the United States would intervene on the side of South Korea, that the North Koreans would be pushed back to the Yalu River
, that Communist China would intervene on the side of North Korea, that a stalemate would result, and that the Americans would retain a long-term presence in South Korea afterwards. All of these events occurred over the course of the Korean War.
Yan died in Taiwan in May 24, 1960. He was buried in the Qixingjun region of Yangmingshan. For decades Yan's residence and grave were cared for by a small number of former aides, who had accompanied Yan from Shanxi. In 2011, when the last of his aides turned eighty-one and became unable to care for the residence, the responsibility of maintaining the site was taken over by the Taipei City Government.
and SARS
epidemics in China, and was used to criticise of the incompetence of Chinese governmental officials in handling such epidemics.
Yan was sincere about his attempts to modernize Shanxi, and achieved success in some regards. Throughout his rule Yan attempted to promote social reforms that later came to be taken for granted, but which were highly controversial in his time: the abolition of foot binding; work for women outside the home; universal primary education; and, the existence of peasant militias as a fundamental unit of the army. Yan was possibly the warlord most committed to his province in his era, but was constantly challenged by his own dilettantism and the talents of his own officials.
Although Yan constantly spoke of the desirability and need for reforms, until the 1930s he remained too conservative to implement anything resembling the kind of reforms needed to successfully modernize Shanxi. Many of his attempts at reform in the 1920s had been attempted generations before, during the Tongzhi Restoration
. These Qing Dynasty reformers had found their reforms inadequate solutions to the problems of their time, and under the Model Governor these reforms proved equally unsatisfactory. During the 1930s Yan became increasingly open to radical social and economic policies, including wealth redistribution via graduated taxation, state-led industrialization, opposition to the money economy, an orientation towards functional (vs. "moral") education, and the large-scale assimilation of Western technology. Despite his adoption of Soviet-style economic policies and increasingly radical attempts at social reform, Yan was regarded as a "conservative" throughout his career, suggesting that the term "conservative" must be used carefully within the context of modern Chinese history.
After Yan's time Shanxi became of site of Mao Zedong
's "model brigade" of Dazhai: a utopian communist scheme in Xiyang County
that was supposed to be the model for all other peasants in China to emulate. If the people of Dazhai were especially suited for such an experiment, it is possible that decades of Yan's socialist indoctrination may have prepared the people of Shanxi for Communist rule. After the death of Mao, the experiment was discontinued, and most peasants reverted to private farming.
Warlord
A warlord is a person with power who has both military and civil control over a subnational area due to armed forces loyal to the warlord and not to a central authority. The term can also mean one who espouses the ideal that war is necessary, and has the means and authority to engage in war...
who served in the government of the Republic of China
Politics of the Republic of China
The politics of the Republic of China ,takes place in a framework of a semi-presidential representative democratic republic, whereby the President is head of state and the premier is head of government, and of a dominant party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative...
. Yan effectively controlled the province of Shanxi
Shanxi
' is a province in Northern China. Its one-character abbreviation is "晋" , after the state of Jin that existed here during the Spring and Autumn Period....
from the 1911 Xinhai Revolution
Xinhai Revolution
The Xinhai Revolution or Hsinhai Revolution, also known as Revolution of 1911 or the Chinese Revolution, was a revolution that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing , and established the Republic of China...
to the 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War
Chinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War was a civil war fought between the Kuomintang , the governing party of the Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China , for the control of China which eventually led to China's division into two Chinas, Republic of China and People's Republic of...
. As the leader of a relatively small, poor, remote province, Yan Xishan survived the machinations of Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai was an important Chinese general and politician famous for his influence during the late Qing Dynasty, his role in the events leading up to the abdication of the last Qing Emperor of China, his autocratic rule as the second President of the Republic of China , and his short-lived...
, the Warlord Era
Warlord era
The Chinese Warlord Era was the period in the history of the Republic of China, from 1916 to 1928, when the country was divided among military cliques, a division that continued until the fall of the Nationalist government in the mainland China regions of Sichuan, Shanxi, Qinghai, Ningxia,...
, the Nationalist Era
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
, the Japanese invasion of China
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...
, and the subsequent civil war
Chinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War was a civil war fought between the Kuomintang , the governing party of the Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China , for the control of China which eventually led to China's division into two Chinas, Republic of China and People's Republic of...
, being forced from office only when the Nationalist armies with which he was aligned had completely lost control of the Chinese mainland, isolating Shanxi from any source of economic or military supply. Yan 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.
Childhood
Yan Xishan was born in the late Qing dynsty in northwestern Shanxi to a family which had been bankers and merchants for generations (Shanxi was known for its many successful banks until the late nineteenth century). As a young man he worked for several years at his father's bank while pursuing a traditional Confucian education at a local village school. After his father was ruined by a late nineteenth-century depression that ravaged the Chinese economy, Yan enrolled in a free military school that was run and financed by the Manchu government in TaiyuanTaiyuan
Taiyuan is the capital and largest city of Shanxi province in North China. At the 2010 census, it had a total population of 4,201,591 inhabitants on 6959 km² whom 3,212,500 are urban on 1,460 km². The name of the city literally means "Great Plains", referring to the location where the Fen River...
. While studying at this school, Yan was first introduced to mathematics, physics, and various other subjects imported directly from the West. In 1904, Yan accompanied his class to Japan, where he was entered into the Imperial Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1909.
Experience in Japan
While studying and living in Japan, Yan was impressed by Japan's efforts to successfully modernize. He observed the progress made by the (previously) unsophisticated and backward inhabitants of Japan, and began to worry about the consequences if China were to fall behind the rest of the world. This formative experience was later cited as a period of great inspiration for Yan's later efforts to modernize Shanxi.Yan eventually concluded that the Japanese had successfully modernized largely due to the Japanese government's abilities to mobilize its populace in support of its policies, and due to the close, respectful relationship that existed between the Japanese military and civilian populations. Yan attributed the surprising Japanese victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War
Russo-Japanese War
The Russo-Japanese War was "the first great war of the 20th century." It grew out of rival imperial ambitions of the Russian Empire and Japanese Empire over Manchuria and Korea...
to the enthusiastic mobilization of the Japanese public in support of the Japanese military. After returning to China in 1909, Yan wrote a pamphlet warning China that his country was in danger of being overtaken by Japan unless they developed a local form of bushido
Bushido
, meaning "Way of the Warrior-Knight", is a Japanese word which is used to describe a uniquely Japanese code of conduct and a way of the samurai life, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry. It originates from the samurai moral code and stresses frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery, and...
.
Even before studying in Japan, Yan had become disgusted with the open and widespread corruption of Qing officials in Shanxi, and had become convinced that China's relative helplessness in the nineteenth century was the result of the dynasty's general unprogressiveness and a grossly inept foreign policy. While he was in Japan, Yan Joined Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese doctor, revolutionary and political leader. As the foremost pioneer of Nationalist China, Sun is frequently referred to as the "Father of the Nation" , a view agreed upon by both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China...
's Revolutionary Alliance
Tongmenghui
The Tongmenghui, also known as the Chinese United League, United League, Chinese Revolutionary Alliance, Chinese Alliance and United Allegiance Society, was a secret society and underground resistance movement formed when merging many Chinese revolutionary groups together by Sun Yat-sen, Song...
(Tongmenghui), and attempted to popularize Sun's ideology by organizing an affiliated "Blood and Iron Society" (鐵血償付團) within the Imperial Military Academy. The apparent goal of this student group was to organize a revolution that would lead to the creation of a strong and united China, similar to how Bismark
Otto von Bismarck
Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg , simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a Prussian-German statesman whose actions unified Germany, made it a major player in world affairs, and created a balance of power that kept Europe at peace after 1871.As Minister President of...
had created a strong and united Germany.
Return to China
When he returned to China in 1909, Yan was assigned to be a division commander in Shanxi. During the 1911 Xinhai RevolutionXinhai Revolution
The Xinhai Revolution or Hsinhai Revolution, also known as Revolution of 1911 or the Chinese Revolution, was a revolution that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing , and established the Republic of China...
, Yan led local revolutionary forces to drive the Manchu forces from the province, proclaiming it independent of the Qing government. Yan justified his actions by attacking the Qing's failure to repel foreign aggression, and promised a wide range of social and political reforms.
Career in the early Republic
Conflict with Yuan Shikai
Yan was elected military governor by his comrades, but was unable to prevent a subsequent invasion by the troops of Yuan ShikaiYuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai was an important Chinese general and politician famous for his influence during the late Qing Dynasty, his role in the events leading up to the abdication of the last Qing Emperor of China, his autocratic rule as the second President of the Republic of China , and his short-lived...
from occupying most parts of Shanxi in 1913. During the period of Yuan's invasion, Yan was only able to survive by withdrawing northward and aligning himself with a friendly insurgent group in neighboring Shaanxi
Shaanxi
' is a province in the central part of Mainland China, and it includes portions of the Loess Plateau on the middle reaches of the Yellow River in addition to the Qinling Mountains across the southern part of this province...
province. By avoiding a decisive military confrontation with Yuan, Yan was able to preserve his own base of power. Though he was friends with Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese doctor, revolutionary and political leader. As the foremost pioneer of Nationalist China, Sun is frequently referred to as the "Father of the Nation" , a view agreed upon by both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China...
, Yan withheld support for him in 1913, ingratiating himself to Yuan, who allowed Yan to return as military governor of Shanxi, commanding a military that was then staffed by Yuan's own henchmen. In 1917, shortly after Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai was an important Chinese general and politician famous for his influence during the late Qing Dynasty, his role in the events leading up to the abdication of the last Qing Emperor of China, his autocratic rule as the second President of the Republic of China , and his short-lived...
's death, Yan solidified his control over Shanxi
Shanxi
' is a province in Northern China. Its one-character abbreviation is "晋" , after the state of Jin that existed here during the Spring and Autumn Period....
, ruling there uncontested. After Yuan's death in 1916, China descended into a period of warlordism.
The determination of Shanxi to resist Manchu rule was a factor leading Yuan himself to believe that only the abolition of the Qing dynasty could bring peace to China and end the civil war. Yan's inability to resist Yuan's military domination of northern China was a factor contributing to Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese doctor, revolutionary and political leader. As the foremost pioneer of Nationalist China, Sun is frequently referred to as the "Father of the Nation" , a view agreed upon by both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China...
's decision not to personally pursue the presidency of the Republic
Republic of China
The Republic of China , commonly known as Taiwan , is a unitary sovereign state located in East Asia. Originally based in mainland China, the Republic of China currently governs the island of Taiwan , which forms over 99% of its current territory, as well as Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and other minor...
, which was established after the end of the Qing dynasty
Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....
. The demonstrated futility of opposing Yuan's military domination can only have made it seem more important to Sun to bring Yuan into the process of ruling of the Republic, and to come to terms with his (potential) enemy.
Efforts to modernize Shanxi
By 1911, Shanxi was one of the poorest provinces in China. Yan believed that, unless he was able to modernize and revive Shanxi's economy and infrastructure, he would be unable to prevent Shanxi from being overrun by rival warlords. A military defeat in 1919 to a rival warlord convinced Yan that Shanxi was not sufficiently developed to compete for hegemony with other warlords, and he avoided the violent national politics of the time by enforcing a neutrality policy on Shanxi, freeing his province from the civil warsWarlord era
The Chinese Warlord Era was the period in the history of the Republic of China, from 1916 to 1928, when the country was divided among military cliques, a division that continued until the fall of the Nationalist government in the mainland China regions of Sichuan, Shanxi, Qinghai, Ningxia,...
. Instead of participating in the ongoing civil wars, Yan devoted himself almost exclusively to modernizing Shanxi and developing its resources. The success of his reforms were sufficient for him to be dubbed by outsiders as the "Model Governor", with Shanxi the "Model Province".
Yan's determination to modernize Shanxi was mostly inspired from his experiences in Japan, but also by his experiences with foreign doctors and personnel who arrived in Shanxi in 1918 in order to help Yan suppress an epidemic which was ravaging the province. Yan was impressed with the zeal, talents, and modern outlook of these personnel, and subsequently compared foreigners favorably to his own conservative and generally apathetic officials. Conversations with other famous reformers, including John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, Hu Shih
Hu Shih
Hu Shih , born Hu Hung-hsing , was a Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat. His courtesy name was Shih-chih . Hu is widely recognized today as a key contributor to Chinese liberalism and language reform in his advocacy for the use of written vernacular Chinese...
, and Yan's close friend H. H. Kung
H. H. Kung
K'ung Hsiang-hsi , often known as Dr. H. H. Kung, was a wealthy Chinese banker and politician in the early 20th century. He was highly influential in determining the economic policies of the KMT government in the 1930s and 1940s...
, reinforced Yan's determination to Westernize Shanxi.
Involvement in the Northern Expedition
In order to maintain Shanxi's neutrality and free it from serious military confrontations with rival warlords, Yan developed a strategy of shifting alliances between various warring cliques, inevitably joining only winning sides. Although he was weaker than many of the warlords that surrounded him, he often held the balance of power between neighboring rivals, and even those that he betrayed hesitated to retaliate against him, in case they might need his support in the future. In order to resist the domination of the Manchurian warlord Zhang ZuolinZhang Zuolin
Zhang Zuolin was the warlord of Manchuria from 1916 to 1928 . He successfully invaded China proper in October 1924 in the Second Zhili-Fengtian War. He gained control of Peking, including China's internationally recognized government, in April 1926...
, Yan allied himself with the forces of Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
in 1927, during the Nationalist's Northern Expedition. While aiding Chiang, Yan's occupation of Beijing in June, 1928, brought the Northern Expedition to a successful conclusion. Yan's assistance to Chiang was rewarded shortly afterwards by his being named Minister of the Interior and deputy commander-in-chief of all Kuomintang armies
Involvement in the Central Plains War
Yan's alliance with Chiang was interrupted the next year, in 1929, when Yan joined Feng YuxiangFeng Yuxiang
Feng Yuxiang was a warlord and leader in Republican China. He was also known as the Christian General for his zeal to convert his troops and the Betrayal General for his penchant to break with the establishment. In 1911, he was an officer in the ranks of Yuan Shikai's Beiyang Army but joined...
to oppose the Nationalists in northern China. While Feng and Chiang's armies were annihilating each other, Yan marched virtually unopposed through Shandong, capturing the provincial capital in June, 1930. After these victories, Yan attempted to forge a new national government, with himself as President, by calling an "Enlarged Party Conference". This conference attempted to draft a national constitution and involved the participation of numerous high-ranking Chinese militarists and politicians, including Wang Jingwei
Wang Jingwei
Wang Jingwei , alternate name Wang Zhaoming, was a Chinese politician. He was initially known as a member of the left wing of the Kuomintang , but later became increasingly anti-Communist after his efforts to collaborate with the CCP ended in political failure...
(who was to serve as Yan's Prime Minister) and Li Zongren
Li Zongren
Li Zongren or Li Tsung-jen , courtesy name Delin , was a prominent Guangxi warlord and Kuomintang military commander during the Northern Expedition, Second Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War...
. These deliberations were deliberately interrupted by Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
who, after decisively defeating Feng's armies, invaded Shandong and virtually annihilated Yan's army. When the governor of Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang
Zhang Xueliang
Zhang Xueliang or Chang Hsüeh-liang , occasionally called Peter Hsueh Liang Chang in English, nicknamed the Young Marshal , was the effective ruler of Manchuria and much of North China after the assassination of his father, Zhang Zuolin, by the Japanese on 4 June 1928...
, publicly declared his allegiance to Chiang (whose support Zhang required in order to contest the Russians and Japanese), Yan fled to Dalian
Dalian
Dalian is a major city and seaport in the south of Liaoning province, Northeast China. It faces Shandong to the south, the Yellow Sea to the east and the Bohai Sea to the west and south. Holding sub-provincial administrative status, Dalian is the southernmost city of Northeast China and China's...
in Manchuria
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...
, only returning to an unconquered Shanxi after making peace with Chiang in 1931. During this "Central Plains War
Central Plains War
Central Plains War was a civil war within the factionalised Kuomintang that broke out in 1930. It was fought between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the coalition of three military commanders who had previously allied with Chiang: Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, and Li Zongren...
", the Kuomintang
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
encouraged Muslims and Mongols to overthrow both Feng Yuxiang
Feng Yuxiang
Feng Yuxiang was a warlord and leader in Republican China. He was also known as the Christian General for his zeal to convert his troops and the Betrayal General for his penchant to break with the establishment. In 1911, he was an officer in the ranks of Yuan Shikai's Beiyang Army but joined...
and Yan. Chiang's defeat of Yan and Feng in 1930 is considered the end of China's Warlord Era
Warlord era
The Chinese Warlord Era was the period in the history of the Republic of China, from 1916 to 1928, when the country was divided among military cliques, a division that continued until the fall of the Nationalist government in the mainland China regions of Sichuan, Shanxi, Qinghai, Ningxia,...
.
The events between 1927 and 1931 are best explained as the strategies of warlords accustomed to the constantly shifting, chaotic alliances which had characterized Chinese politics since the breakdown of the central government a decade earlier. The main cause of Yan's defeat was the low population and lack of development in the areas that Yan had under his control, making him incapable of fielding a large and well-equipped army similar to the armies commanded by Chiang at the time. Yan was also unable to match the quality of leadership in Chiang's officer corps and the prestige that Chiang and the Nationalist army possessed at the time. Before Chiang's armies defeated Feng and Yan, Yan Xishan appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, including the subtitle "China's Next President." The attention given to him by foreign observers in this period, and the support and assistance that he had secured from other high-profile Chinese statesmen, implies that there was a credible expectation that Yan would lead a central government if Chiang failed to defeat Yan's alliance.
Return to Shanxi
Yan was only able to return to Shanxi through a complex effort of intrigue and politicking. Much of Chiang's failure to immediately and permanently eject Yan or his subordinates from Shanxi was due largely to the influence of Zhang Xueliang and the Japanese, who were anxious to prevent the extension of Chiang's authority into Manchuria. In Yan's absence, the civil government of Shanxi ground to a halt, and the various military leaders of Shanxi struggled with each other to fill the vacuum, forcing Chiang's government to appoint Shanxi's leaders from among Yan's subordinates. Although he did not immediately declare his return to provincial politics, Yan returned to Shanxi in 1931 with the support and protection of Zhang. This move was not protested by Chiang due to Chiang's involvement in suppressing the forces of Li ZongrenLi Zongren
Li Zongren or Li Tsung-jen , courtesy name Delin , was a prominent Guangxi warlord and Kuomintang military commander during the Northern Expedition, Second Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War...
, who had marched up to northern Hunan
Hunan
' is a province of South-Central China, located to the south of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and south of Lake Dongting...
from his base in Guangxi
Guangxi
Guangxi, formerly romanized Kwangsi, is a province of southern China along its border with Vietnam. In 1958, it became the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, a region with special privileges created specifically for the Zhuang people.Guangxi's location, in...
in support of Yan.
Yan remained in the background of Shanxi politics until the Nanjing government's failure to resist the Japanese takeover of Manchuria after the Mukden Incident
Mukden Incident
The Mukden Incident, also known as the Manchurian Incident, was a staged event that was engineered by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for invading the northern part of China known as Manchuria in 1931....
gave Yan and his followers an opportunity to informally overthrow the Kuomintang in Shanxi. In December 18, 1931, a group of students (supported and perhaps orchestrated by officials loyal to Yan) gathered in Taiyuan to protest the Nanjing government's policy of not fighting the Japanese. This demonstration became so violent that Kuomintang police fired into the crowd. The outrage that this "Massacre of December Eighteenth" generated was strong enough that it gave Yan's officials a pretext to expel the Kuomintang from the province, on the grounds of public safety. After this event the Kuomintang ceased to exist in Shanxi except as a dummy organization whose members were more loyal to Yan Xishan than to Chiang Kai-shek.
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 retain the title of Pacification Commissioner in 1932, and he appointed Yan to the central government's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission
Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission
The Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission is one of two ministry-level commissions of the Executive Yuan in the Republic of China. Inaugural addresses are delivered by the Chairman of the Commission...
. In 1934 Chiang finally flew to Taiyuan, where he praised Yan's administration in return for Yan's public support for Nanjing. By publicly praising Yan's government, Chiang in effect admitted that Yan remained the undisputed ruler of Shanxi.
Subsequent relationship with the Nationalist government
After 1931, Yan continued to give nominal support to the Nanjing government while maintaining de facto control over Shanxi, alternatively cooperating and conflicting with Communist agents active in his province. Although he was not an active participant, Yan supported the 1936 Xian Incident, in which Chiang Kai-shekChiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
was violently arrested by Nationalist officers led by Zhang Xueliang
Zhang Xueliang
Zhang Xueliang or Chang Hsüeh-liang , occasionally called Peter Hsueh Liang Chang in English, nicknamed the Young Marshal , was the effective ruler of Manchuria and much of North China after the assassination of his father, Zhang Zuolin, by the Japanese on 4 June 1928...
, and released only when Chiang agreed to make peace with the Communists and form a "united front" to resist the impending Japanese invasion of China. In his correspondence with Zhang Xueliang
Zhang Xueliang
Zhang Xueliang or Chang Hsüeh-liang , occasionally called Peter Hsueh Liang Chang in English, nicknamed the Young Marshal , was the effective ruler of Manchuria and much of North China after the assassination of his father, Zhang Zuolin, by the Japanese on 4 June 1928...
in 1936, Yan indicated that the growing rift between Yan and Chiang was due to Yan's anxieties over the potential for a Japanese invasion and a concern for the subsequent fate of China, and because Yan was not convinced of the correctness of focusing China's resources on anti-Communist campaigns. During the Xian Incident itself, Yan actively involved himself in the negotiations, sending representatives to prevent Chiang's execution (and the civil war that Yan believed would follow), while pushing for a united front to resist the Japanese invasion of China that Yan believed was imminent.
The financial relationship between Shanxi and the central government remained complicated. Yan 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 Kai-shek. Despite his measured successes in modernizing the industry of Shanxi, Yan repeatedly petitioned the central government for financial assistance in order to extend the local railroad, and for other reasons, but was generally refused. When Yan 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: due to these artificially low salt prices, neighboring provinces virtually stopped purchasing Shanxi salt altogether. 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 had announced several years before.
Public policies
In Shanxi, Yan implemented numerous successful reforms in an effort to centralize his control over the province. Although embracing the traditional values of the landed gentry, he denounced their "oppression" of the peasantry, and took steps to initiate land reform and to weaken the power of landowners over the populace in the countryside. These reforms weakened potential rivals in his province in addition to benefiting Shanxi farmers.Yan attempted to develop his army as a locally recruited force which cultivated a public image of being servants, rather than masters, of the people. He developed an all-encompassing, idiosyncratic ideology (literally "Yan Xishan Thought") and disseminated it by sponsoring a network of villiage newspapers and travelling dramatic troupes. He coordinated dramatic public meetings in which participants confessed their own misdeeds and/or denounced those of others. He 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 devised and implemented these reforms (during the Warlord Era) contradicts later claims that these reforms were modeled on Communist programs, and not vice versa.
Military policies
When Yan returned from Japan in 1909 he was a firm proponent of militarism, and proposed a system of national conscription along German and Japanese lines. Germany's defeat in World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and Yan's defeat in Henan
Henan
Henan , is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the central part of the country. Its one-character abbreviation is "豫" , named after Yuzhou , a Han Dynasty state that included parts of Henan...
in 1919 caused Yan to reassess the value of militarism as a way of life. Yan then decreased the size of the army until 1923 (in order to save money), until a rumor circulated that rival warlords were planning on invading Shanxi. Yan then introduced military reforms designed to train a rural militia of 100,000 men along the lines of Japanese and American reserves.
Yan attempted, via conscription, to create a civilian reserve that would become the foundation of society in Shanxi. Because his troops were perhaps the only army in the Warlord era drawn exclusively from the province in which they were stationed, because Yan insisted that his soldiers perform work to improve Shanxi's infrastructure, including road-maintenance and assisting farmers, and because Yan's 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 rival's armies in China.
Yan's officer corps was drawn from Shanxi's gentry, and given two years of education at government expense. Despite efforts to subject his officers to a rigorous, Japanese-style training regimen, and to indocrinate them in Yan Xishan Thought, his armies never proved to be especially well-trained or disciplined in battle. In general, Yan's record of military defeats is not considered positive, and it is unclear whether Yan's officer corps either understood or sympathized with Yan's objectives, instead entering his service solely in the interests of achieving prestige and a higher standard of living. Yan built an arsenal in Taiyuan that, for the entire period of his administration, remained the only center in China capable of producing field artillery. The presence of this arsenal was one of the main reasons that Yan was able to maintain Shanxi's relative independence. While not effective fighting rival warlords, Yan's army was successful in eradicating banditry in Shanxi, allowing Yan to maintain a relatively high level of public order and security. Yan's successes in eradicating banditry in Shanxi include his cooperation with Yuan Shikai to defeat Bai Lang's remnant rebels after the failed 1913-1914 Bai Lang Rebellion
Bai Lang Rebellion
The Bai Lang Rebellion, was a Chinese "bandit" rebellion that lasted from mid-1913 to late-1914. Launched against the Republican government of Yuan Shikai, the rebellion was led by Bai Lang...
.
Attempts at social reform
Yan went to great lengths to eradicate social traditions which he considered antiquated. He insisted that all men in Shanxi abandon their Qing-era queves, giving police instructions to clip off the queves of anyone still wearing them. In one instance, Yan lured people into theatres in order to have his police systematically cut the hair of the audience. Yan 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. After Kuomintang military victories in 1925 generated great interest in Shanxi for the Nationalist ideology, including women's rights, Yan allowed girls to enroll in middle school and college, where they promptly formed a women's association.Yan attempted to eradicate the custom of footbinding, threatening to sentence men who married women with bound feet, and mothers who bound their daughters' feet, to hard labour in state-run factories. He discouraged the use of the traditional lunar calendar and encouraged the development of local boy scout organizations. Like the Communists who later succeeded Yan, he punished habitual lawbreakers to "redemption through labour" in state-run factories.
Attempts to eradicate opium use
In 1916 at least 10% of Shanxi's eleven million people were addicted to opium, and Yan attempted to eradicate opium use in Shanxi after he came to power. At first, Yan dealt with opium dealers and addicts severely, throwing opium addicts in prison and exposing them and their families to public humiliation. Many convicted of opium-related offences then died of sudden withdrawal from the drug. After 1922, partly due to public opposition to harsh punishment, Yan abandoned punishing addicts in favor of attempting to rehabilitate them, pressuring individuals through their families and constructing sanitariums designed to slowly cure addicts of their addictions.Yan's attempts to suppress the opium trade in Shanxi were largely successful, and the number of opium addicts in the province was reduced by 80% by 1922. In the absence of efforts by other warlords to combat opium production and trade, Yan's efforts to combat opium use only increased the price of opium so high that narcotics of all kinds were drawn into Shanxi from other provinces. Users often switched from opium to pills mixed from morphine and heroin, which were easier to smuggle and use. Because the most influential and powerful gentry in Shanxi were often the worst offenders, officials drawn from the privileged class of Shanxi seldom enforced Yan's decrees outlawing the use of narcotics, and often evaded punishment themselves. Eventually Yan was forced to abandon his efforts to suppress opium trafficking, and attempted instead to establish a government monopoly on the production and sale of opium in Shanxi. Yan continued to complain about the availability of narcotics into the 1930s, and after 1932 executed over 600 people caught smuggling drugs into Shanxi. The traffic persisted, but Yan's interests in opposing it were perhaps limited by a fear of provoking the Japanese, who manufactured most of the morphine and heroin available in China inside their concession area in Tianjin
Tianjin
' is a metropolis in northern China and one of the five national central cities of the People's Republic of China. It is governed as a direct-controlled municipality, one of four such designations, and is, thus, under direct administration of the central government...
, and who came to control much of the drug trade in northern China in the 1930s.
Limitations of economic reforms
Yan's efforts to stimulate Shanxi's economy mostly consisted of state-led investment in a broad variety of industries, and he generally failed to encourage private investment and trade. Though gains were made to improve the economy of Shanxi, Yan's efforts were limited by the fact that he himself had little formal training in economic or industrial theory. Yan also suffered from a lack of experienced, trained advisers capable of directing even moderately complicated tasks related to economic development. Because most of the educated staff that he did have access to were solidly entrenched within the landed gentry of Shanxi, it is possible that many of his officials may have deliberately sabotaged Yan's efforts for reform, preferring that the peasants working their fields continue their cheap, traditional labour.Yan Xishan Thought
Throughout his life Yan Xishan attempted to identify, formulate, and disseminate a comprehensive ideology that would improve the morale and loyalty of his officials and the people of Shanxi. During his time of study in Japan, Yan became attracted to militarismMilitarism
Militarism is defined as: the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests....
and Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
, but he renounced these after World War I. Throughout the rest of Yan's life, he identified with the position of most Chinese conservatives at the time: that social and economic reform would progress from ethical reform, and that the problems confronting China could only be solved by the moral rehabilitation of the Chinese people. Believing that no single ideology existed to unify the Chinese people at the time that he came to power, Yan attempted to generate an ideal ideology himself, and once boasted that he had succeeded in creating a comprehensive system of belief that embodied the best features of "militarism, nationalism, anarchism, democracy, capitalism, communism, individualism, imperialism, universalism, paternalism, and utopianism". Much of Yan's attempts to spread his ideology were through a network of semi-religious organizations known as "Heart-Washing Societies".
Influence of Confucianism
Yan was emotionally attached to ConfucianismConfucianism
Confucianism is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius . Confucianism originated as an "ethical-sociopolitical teaching" during the Spring and Autumn Period, but later developed metaphysical and cosmological elements in the Han...
by virtue of his upbringing, and because he identified its values as a historically effective solution to the chaos and disorder of his time. Yan justified his rule via Confucian political theories, and attempted to revive Confucianism virtues as being universally accepted. In his speeches and writing Yan developed an extravagant admiration for the virtues of moderation and harmony associated with the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean
Doctrine of the Mean
The Doctrine of the Mean , is both a concept and one of the books of Confucian teachings. The composition of the text is attributed to Zisi the only grandson of Confucius, and it came from a chapter in the Classic of Rites...
. Many of the reforms that Yan attempted were undertaken with the intention of demonstrating that he was a junzi, the epitome of Confucian virtue.
Yan's interpretations of Confucianism were mostly borrowed from the form of Neo-Confucianism
Neo-Confucianism
Neo-Confucianism is an ethical and metaphysical Chinese philosophy influenced by Confucianism, that was primarily developed during the Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty, but which can be traced back to Han Yu and Li Ao in the Tang Dynasty....
that was popular in the Qing dynasty. He taught that everyone had a capacity for innate goodness, but that in order to fulfill this capacity people had to subordinate their emotions and desires to the control of their conscience. He admired the Ming dynasty
Ming Dynasty
The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
philosophers Lu Jiuyuan
Lu Jiuyuan
thumb|200px|Lu JiuyuanLu Jiuyuan was a Chinese scholar and philosopher who founded the school of the universal mind, the second most influential Neo-Confucian school...
and Wang Yangming
Wang Yangming
Wang Yangming was a Ming Chinese idealist Neo-Confucian philosopher, official, educationist, calligraphist and general. After Zhu Xi, he is commonly regarded as the most important Neo-Confucian thinker, with interpretations of Confucianism that denied the rationalist dualism of the orthodox...
, who disparaged knowledge and who urged men to act on the basis of their intuition. Because Yan believed that human beings could only achieve their potentials through intense self-criticism and self-cultivation, Yan established in every town a Heart-Washing Society, whose members gathered each Sunday to meditate and listen to sermons based on the themes of the Confucian classics. Everyone at these meetings was supposed to rise and confess aloud his misdeeds of the past week, inviting criticism from the other members.
Influence of Christianity
Yan attributed much of the West's vitality to Christianity, and believed that China could only resist and overtake the West by generating an ideological tradition that was equally inspiring. Yan appreciated the efforts of missionaries (mostly Americans who maintained a complex of schools in TaiguTaigu County
Taigu County is a county of Shanxi, China. It is under the administration of Jinzhong city. It located at 37°25'N 112°33'E.-External links:*...
) to educate and modernize Shanxi. Yan regularly addressed the graduating classes of these schools, but was generally unsuccessful in recruiting these students to serve his regime. Yan supported the indigenous Christian church in Taiyuan, and at one time seriously considered using Christian chaplains in his army. Yan's public support of Christianity waned after 1925, when he failed to come to the defense of Christians during anti-foreigner and anti-Christian demonstrations that polarized Taiyuan.
Yan deliberately organized many features of his Heart-Washing Society on the Christian church, including ending each service with hymns praising Confucius. Yan urged his subjects to place their faith in a supreme being that he called "Shangdi": he justified his belief in Shangdi via the Confucian classics, but described Shangdi in terms very similar to the Christian interpretation of God. Like Christianity, Yan Xishan Thought was permeated with the belief that, through accepting his ideology, people could become regenerated or reborn.
Influence of Chinese Nationalism
In 1911 Yan came to power in Shanxi as a disciple of Chinese Nationalism, but subsequently came to view Nationalism as merely another set of ideas which could be used to achieve his own objectives. Yan stated that the primary goal of the Heart-Washing Society was to encourage Chinese patriotism by reviving the Confucian church, leading foreigners to accuse him of attempting to create a Chinese version of Shinto.Yan attempted to moderate some aspects of Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese doctor, revolutionary and political leader. As the foremost pioneer of Nationalist China, Sun is frequently referred to as the "Father of the Nation" , a view agreed upon by both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China...
's ideology that he viewed as potentially threatening to his rule. Yan altered some of Sun's doctrines before disseminating them in Shanxi, formulating his own version of Sun's Three Principles of the People
Three Principles of the People
The Three Principles of the People, also translated as Three People's Principles, or collectively San-min Doctrine, is a political philosophy developed by Sun Yat-sen as part of a philosophy to make China a free, prosperous, and powerful nation...
that replaced the principles of nationalism and democracy with the principles of virtue and knowledge. During the 1919 May Fourth Movement
May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially the Shandong Problem...
, when students in Taiyuan staged anti-foreign demonstrations, Yan warned that patriotism, like rainfall, was beneficial only when moderate.
After the Kuomintang
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
succeeded in forming a nominal central government in 1930, Yan encouraged Nationalist principles that he viewed as socially beneficial. During the 1930s Yan attempted to set up in every village a "Good People's Movement" in order to promote the values of Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
's New Life Movement
New Life Movement
The New Life Movement was set up by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong May-ling in February 1934, with the help of the Blue Shirts Society and the CC Clique within the Chinese Nationalist Party...
. These values included honesty, friendliness, dignity, diligence, modesty, thrift, personal neatness, and obedience.
Influence of socialism and communism
In 1931 Yan returned from his exile in Dalian impressed with the apparent successes of the Soviet Union's first Five-year plan, and attempted to reorganize the economy of Shanxi using Soviet methods, according to a local "Ten Year Plan" that Yan himself developed. Throughout the 1930s Yan bluntly equated economic development with state control of industry and finance, and he was successful in bringing most major industry and commerce under state control by the late 1930s.Yan's speeches after 1931 reflect an interpretation of Marxist economics (mostly drawn from Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
) that Yan gained while in exile in Dalian. Following this interpretation, Yan attempted to change the economy of Shanxi to become more like that of the USSR, inspiring a scheme of economic "distribution according to labour". When the threat of Chinese Communists became a significant threat to Yan's rule, Yan defended the Communists as courageous and self-sacrificing fanatics who were different from common bandits (contrary to Kuomintang propaganda) and whose challenge must be met by social and economic reforms that alleviated the conditions responsible for communism.
Like Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, Yan wanted to eliminate what he saw as unearned profit by restructuring Shanxi's economy to reward only those who worked. Unlike Marx, Yan reinterpreted Communism to correct what he believed was Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
's chief flaw: the inevitability of class warfare. Yan 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. By rejecting economic determinism in favor of morality and free will, Yan hoped to create a society that was more productive and less violent than communism, while avoiding the exploitation and human misery that he believed was the inevitable result of capitalism.
Yan interpreted Roosevelt's
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
as promoting socialism in order to combat the spread of communism. "The New Deal is an effective way of stopping communism," Yan said, "by having the government step in and ride roughshod over the interests of the rich." Yan then undertook a series of public works projects inspired by the New Deal in order to reduce unemployment in his own province.
Extent of success
In spite of his efforts, Yan did not succeed in making Yan Xishan 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 himself blamed the failure of his ideology to become popular on the faults of his officials, charging that they abused their power and failed to explain his ideas to the common people. In general, the officials of Shanxi misappropriated funds intended to be used for propaganda, attempted to explain Yan's ideas in language too sophisticated for the common people, and often behaved in a dictatorial manner that discredited Yan's ideology and failed to generate popular enthusiasm for Yan's regime.Early conflict with Japan
Yan did not come into serious conflict with the Japanese until the early 1930s. While he was in exile in Dalian in 1930, Yan became aware of Japanese plans to invade ManchuriaMukden Incident
The Mukden Incident, also known as the Manchurian Incident, was a staged event that was engineered by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for invading the northern part of China known as Manchuria in 1931....
, and feigned collaboration with the Japanese in order to pressure Chiang Kai-shek into allowing Yan to return to Shanxi before warning Chiang of Japan's intent. Japan's subsequent success in taking Manchuria in 1931 terrified Yan, who stated that a major objective of his Ten Year Plan was to strengthen Shanxi's defense against the Japanese. In the early 1930s Yan supported anti-Japanese riots, denounced the Japanese occupation of Manchuria as "barbarous" and "evil", publicly appealed to Chiang to send troops to Manchuria, and arranged for his arsenal to arm partisans fighting the Japanese occupation in Manchuria.
In December 1931 Yan was warned that, after taking control of Manchuria, the Japanese would attempt to take control of Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia
Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, located in the northern region of the country. Inner Mongolia shares an international border with the countries of Mongolia and the Russian Federation...
by subverting Chinese authority in Chahar and Suiyuan. In order to prevent this Yan took control of Suiyuan first, developing Suiyuan's large iron deposits (24% of all iron in China), and settling the province with thousands of soldier-farmers. When Manchurian soldiers (armed and led by the Japanese) finally invaded Chahar in 1935, Yan virtually declared war on the Japanese by accepting a position as "advisor" of the Suiyuan Mongolian Political Council, an organization created by the central government to organize Mongolian opposition to the Japanese.
The Japanese began promoting "autonomy" for northern China in the summer of 1935. Apparently, many high-ranking Japanese in China believed that Yan and many others in the north were fundamentally pro-Japanese, and would readily subordinate themselves to the Japanese in exchange for protection from Chiang Kai-shek. Yan published an open letter in September in which he accused the Japanese of desiring to conquer all of China over the next two decades. According to Japanese sources, Yan entered into negotiations with the Japanese in 1935, but was never very enthusiastic about "autonomy" and rejected their overtures when he realized that they intended to make him their puppet. Yan likely used these negotiations to frighten Chiang Kai-shek into using his armies to defend Shanxi, since he was afraid that Chiang was preparing to sacrifice northern China to avoid fighting the Japanese. If these were Yan's intentions, they were successful, as Chiang assured Yan that he would defend Shanxi with his army in the event that Shanxi was invaded.
Early conflict with the Chinese Communist Party
Although Yan admired its philosophy and economic methods, he feared the threat posed by Chinese communists almost as much as the Japanese. In the early 1930s Yan observed that, if it invaded Shanxi, the Red Army would enjoy the support of 70% of his subjects, and would readily be able to recruit one million men from among the most desperate citizens of Shanxi. Yan remarked that "the job of suppressing communism is 70 percent political and only 30 percent military, while the job of preventing its growth altogether is 90 percent political." In order to prevent a Communist threat to Shanxi, Yan sent troops to fight the Communists in Jiangxi and (later) ShaanxiShaanxi
' is a province in the central part of Mainland China, and it includes portions of the Loess Plateau on the middle reaches of the Yellow River in addition to the Qinling Mountains across the southern part of this province...
, organized the gentry and village authorities into anti-corruption and anti-communist political organizations, and attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to undertake a large-scale programme of land reform.
These reforms did not prevent the spread of Communist guerilla operations into Shanxi. Led by Liu Zhidan and Xu Haidong
Xu Haidong
Xu Haidong was a Grand General in the People's Liberation Army of China.Xu was born in Huangpi , Hubei, China. He was the six kid of his parents, who had a total of 10 children. His father was Xue Zhongben and his mother is only remembered by her last name, Wu...
, 34,000 Communist troops crossed into southwestern Shanxi in February 1936. As Yan predicted, the Communists enjoyed massive popular support; and, although they were outnumbered and ill-armed, succeeded in occupying the southern third of Shanxi in less than a month. The Communists' strategy of guerilla warfare was extremely effective against, and demoralizing for, Yan's forces, who repeatedly fell victim to surprise attacks. The Communists in Shanxi made good use of cooperation supplied by local peasants to evade and easily locate Yan's forces. When reinforcements sent by the central government forced the Communists to withdraw from Shanxi, the Red Army escaped by splitting into small groups that were actively supplied and hidden by local supporters. Yan himself admitted that his forces had fought poorly during the campaign. The KMT forces that remained in Shanxi expressed hostility to Yan's rule, but did not interfere with his governance.
Invasion by Mengguguo
In March 1936, ManchurianManchukuo
Manchukuo or Manshū-koku was a puppet state in Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, governed under a form of constitutional monarchy. The region was the historical homeland of the Manchus, who founded the Qing Empire in China...
troops occupying the Inner Mongolian province of Chahar invaded northeastern Suiyuan, which Yan controlled. These Japanese-aligned troops seized the city of Bailingmiao in northern Suiyuan, where the pro-Japanese Inner Mongolian Autonomous Political Council maintained its headquarters. Three months later, the head of the Political Council, Prince Teh (Demchugdongrub)
Demchugdongrub
Prince Demchugdongrub was the leader of a Mongol independence movement in Inner Mongolia. He was the chairman of Mengjiang, a Japanese puppet state in World War II....
declared that he was the ruler of an independent Mongolia (Mengguguo
Mengjiang
Mengjiang , also known in English as Mongol Border Land, was an autonomous area in Inner Mongolia, operating under nominal Chinese sovereignty and Japanese control. It consisted of the then-Chinese provinces of Chahar and Suiyuan, corresponding to the central part of modern Inner Mongolia...
), and organized an army with the aid of Japanese equipment and training. In August 1936 Prince Teh's army attempted to invade eastern Suiyuan, but it was defeated by Yan's forces under the command of Fu Zuoyi
Fu Zuoyi
Fu Zuoyi was a Chinese military leader. He began his military career in the service of Yan Xishan, and he was widely praised for his defense of Suiyuan from the Japanese. During the final stages of the Chinese Civil War, Fu surrendered the large and strategic garrison around Beiping to Communist...
. Following this defeat, Prince Teh planned another invasion while Japanese agents carefully sketched and photographed Suiyuan's defenses.
To prepare for the imminent threat of Japanese invasion that Yan felt after Suiyuan was invaded, Yan attempted to force all students to undergo several months of compulsive military training, and formed an informal alliance with the Communists for the purpose of fighting the Japanese, several months before the Xi'an Incident
Xi'an Incident
The Xi'an Incident of December 1936 is an important episode of Chinese modern history, taking place in the city of Xi'an during the Chinese Civil War between the ruling Kuomintang and the rebel Chinese Communist Party and just before the Second Sino-Japanese War...
Compelled Chiang Kai-shek to do the same. In November 1936 the army of Prince Teh presented Fu Zuoyi with an ultimatum to surrender. When Fu responded that Prince Teh was merely a puppet of "certain quarters" and requested that Teh submit to the authority of the central government, Prince Teh's Mongolian and Manchurian armies launched another, more ambitious attack. Teh's 15,000 soldiers were armed with Japanese weapons, supported by Japanese aircraft, and often led by Japanese officers. (Japanese soldiers fighting for Mengguguo were often executed after their capture as illegal combatants, since Mengguguo was not recognized as being part of Japan).
In anticipation of this war, Japanese spies destroyed a large supply depot in Datong
Datong
Datong is a prefecture-level city in northern Shanxi Province of North China, located a few hundred kilometres west by rail from Beijing with an elevation of...
and carried out other acts of sabotage. Yan placed his best troops and most able generals, including Zhao Chengshou
Zhao Chengshou
Zhao Chengshou was a KMT general from Shanxi....
and Yan's son-in-law, Wang Jingguo
Wang Jingguo
Wang Jingguo was a KMT general from Shanxi. He was the son-in-law of the warlord who controlled Shanxi from 1911-1949, Yan Xishan. Wang served throughout his career in Yan's army, fighting in numerous campaigns.-Suiyuan:...
, under the command of Fu Zuoyi. During the month of fighting that ensued, the army or Mengguguo suffered severe casualties. Fu's forces succeeded in occupying Bailingmiao on November 24, 1936, and was considering invading Chahar before he was warned by the Kwangtung Army that doing so would provoke an attack by the Japanese Army. Prince Teh's forces repeatedly attempted to retake Bailingmiao, but this only provoked Fu into sending troops north, where he successfully seized the last of Teh's bases in Suiyuan and virtually annihilated his army. After Japanese were found to be aiding Teh, Yan publicly accused Japan of aiding the invaders. Yan's victories in Suiyuan over Japanese-backed forces were praised by Chinese newspapers and magazines, other warlords and political leaders, and many students and members of the Chinese public.
The Second Sino-Japanese War
During the Second Sino-Japanese WarSecond Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...
(1937–1945), most regions of Shanxi were quickly overrun by the Japanese
Empire of Japan
The Empire of Japan is the name of the state of Japan that existed from the Meiji Restoration on 3 January 1868 to the enactment of the post-World War II Constitution of...
, but Yan refused to flee the province after losing the provincial capital, Taiyuan. He relocated his headquarters to a remote corner of the province, effectively resisting Japanese attempts to completely seize Shanxi. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese made no less than five attempts to negotiate peace terms with Yan and hoped that Yan would become a second Wang Jingwei
Wang Jingwei
Wang Jingwei , alternate name Wang Zhaoming, was a Chinese politician. He was initially known as a member of the left wing of the Kuomintang , but later became increasingly anti-Communist after his efforts to collaborate with the CCP ended in political failure...
, but Yan refused and stayed on the Chinese side.
Early campaigns
In July 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge IncidentMarco Polo Bridge Incident
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident was a battle between the Republic of China's National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army, often used as the marker for the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War .The eleven-arch granite bridge, Lugouqiao, is an architecturally significant structure,...
provoked the Japanese into attacking Chinese forces in and around Beijing, the Japanese sent a large amount of warplanes and Manchurian soldiers to reinforce Prince Teh's army. This caused Yan to believe that a Japanese invasion of Shanxi was imminent, and he flew to Nanjing to communicate the situation to Chiang Kai-shek. Yan left his meeting in Nanjing with an appointment as commander of the Second War Zone, comprising Shanxi, Suiyuan, Chahar, and northern Shaanxi.
After returning to Shanxi, Yan encouraged his officials to be suspicious of enemy spies and hanjian
Hanjian
In Chinese culture, a Hanjian is a derogatory and pejorative term for a race traitor to the Han Chinese nation or state, and to a lesser extent, Han ethnicity. The word Hanjian is distinct from the general word for traitor, which could be used for any race or country...
, and ordered his forces to attack Prince Teh's forces in northern Chahar, hoping to surprise and overwhelm them quickly. The Mongolian and Manchu forces were quickly routed, and Japanese reinforcements attempted to force their way through the strategic Nankou pass suffered heavy casualties. Overwhelming Japanese firepower, including artillery, bombers, and tanks, eventually forced Yan's forces to surrender Nankou, after which Japanese forces quickly seized Suiyuan and Datong. The Japanese then began the invasion of Shanxi in earnest.
As the Japanese advanced southward into Taiyuan basin, Yan attempted to impose discipline on his army by executing General Li Fuying and other officers guilty of retreating from the enemy. He issued orders not to withdraw or 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. In the face of continued Japanese advances Yan apologized to the central government for his army's defeats, asked it to assume responsibility for the defense of Shanxi, and agreed to share control of the provincial government with one of Chiang Kai-shek's representatives.
Alliance with the Communists
In an effort to resist the Japanese, Yan invited Communist forces to re-enter Shanxi. Zhu DeZhu De
Zhu De was a Chinese militarist, politician, revolutionary, and one of the pioneers of the Chinese Communist Party. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, in 1955 Zhu became one of the Ten Marshals of the People's Liberation Army, of which he is regarded as the founder.-Early...
became the commander of the Eighth Route Army
Eighth Route Army
The Eighth Route Army was the larger of the two major Chinese communist forces that formed a unit of the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China which fought the Japanese from 1937 to 1945. In contrast to most of the National Revolutionary Army, it was controlled by the Communist...
active in Shanxi and was named the vice-commander of the Second War Zone, under Yan himself. Agents working under Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976...
set up a headquarters in Taiyuan. Yan initially responded warmly to the re-entry of the arrival of Communist forces, and they were greeted with enthusiasm by Yan's officials and officers.
Communist forces arrived in Shanxi just in time to help defeat a decisively more powerful Japanese force attempting to move through the strategic mountain pass of Pingxingguan
Battle of Pingxingguan
The Battle of Pingxingguan , also commonly called the "Great Victory of Pingxingguan" in Mainland China, was an engagement fought between the 8th Route Army of the Communist Party of China and the Imperial Japanese Army on September 25, 1937....
. After the Japanese responded to this defeat by outflanking the defenders and moving towards Taiyuan, the Communists avoided decisive battles and mostly attempted to harass Japanese forces and sabotage Japanese lines of supply and communication. The Japanese suffered, but mostly ignored the Eighth Route Army and continued to advance towards Yan's capital. The lack of attention directed at their forces gave the Communists time to recruit and propagandize among the local peasant populations (who generally welcomed Communist forces enthusiastically) and to organize a network of militia units, local guerilla bands, and popular mass organizations.
Genuine Communist efforts to resist the Japanese gave them the authority to carry out sweeping and radical social and economic reforms, mostly related to land and wealth redistribution, which they defended by labeling those who resisted as hanjian
Hanjian
In Chinese culture, a Hanjian is a derogatory and pejorative term for a race traitor to the Han Chinese nation or state, and to a lesser extent, Han ethnicity. The word Hanjian is distinct from the general word for traitor, which could be used for any race or country...
. Communist efforts to resist the Japanese also won over Shanxi's small population of patriotic intellectuals, and conservative fears of resisting them effectively gave the Communists unlimited access to the rural population. Subsequent atrocities committed by the Japanese in the effort to rid Shanxi of Communist guerillas aroused the hatred of millions in the Shanxi countryside, causing the rural population to turn to the Communists for leadership against the Japanese. All of these factors explain how, within a year of re-entering Shanxi, the Communists were able to take control of most of Shanxi not firmly held by the Japanese
Fall of Taiyuan
By executing commanders guilty of retreating, Yan succeeded in improving the morale of his forces. During the Battle of PingxingguanBattle of Pingxingguan
The Battle of Pingxingguan , also commonly called the "Great Victory of Pingxingguan" in Mainland China, was an engagement fought between the 8th Route Army of the Communist Party of China and the Imperial Japanese Army on September 25, 1937....
Shanxi troops successfully resisted numerous Japanese assaults while the Eight Route Army harassed the Japanese from the rear and along their flanks. Other units of Yan's army successfully defended other nearby passes. After the Japanese successfully broke into the Taiyan basin, the Japanese continued to encounter ferocious resistance. At Yuanping
Yuanping, Shanxi
-References:*...
, a single brigade of Yan's troops held out against the entire Japanese advance for over a week, allowing reinforcements sent by the central government to take up defensive positions at Xinkou
Battle of Xinkou
The Battle of Xinkou was the second of the 22 major engagements between the National Revolutionary Army and Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.-Prelude:...
. The Communist generals Zhu De and Peng Dehuai
Peng Dehuai
Peng Dehuai was a prominent military leader of the Communist Party of China, and China's Defence Minister from 1954 to 1959. Peng was an important commander during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese civil war and was also the commander-in-chief of People's Volunteer Army in the Korean War...
criticized Yan for what they called "suicidal tactics", but Yan was confident that the heavy losses suffered by the Japanese would eventually demoralize them, forcing the Japanese to abandon their effort to take Shanxi.
During the Battle of Xinkou
Battle of Xinkou
The Battle of Xinkou was the second of the 22 major engagements between the National Revolutionary Army and Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.-Prelude:...
, the Chinese defenders resisted the efforts of Japan's Itakagi Division for over a month, despite Japanese advantages in artillery and air support. By the end of October, 1937, Japan's losses were four times greater than those suffered at Pingxingguan, and the Itakagi Division was close to defeat. Contemporary Communist accounts called the battle "the most fierce in North China", while Japanese accounts called the battle a "stalemate". In an effort to save their forces at Xinkou, Japanese forces began an effort to occupy Shanxi from a second direction, in the east. After a week of fighting, Japanese forces captured the strategic Niangzi Pass, opening the way to capturing Taiyuan. Communist guerilla tactics were ineffective in slowing down the Japanese advance. The defenders at Xinkou, realizing that they were in danger of being outflanked, withdrew southward, past Taiyuan, leaving a small force of 6,000 men to hold off the entire Japanese army. A representative of the Japanese army, speaking of the final defense of Taiyuan
Battle of Taiyuan
The Japanese offensive called 太原作戦 or the Battle of Taiyuan was a major battle fought between China and Japan named for Taiyuan , which lay in the 2nd Military Region...
, said that "nowhere in China have the Chinese fought so obstinately".
The Japanese suffered 30,000 dead and an equal number wounded in the effort to take northern Shanxi. A Japanese study found that the battles of Pingxingguan, Xinkou, and Taiyuan were responsible for over half of all casualties suffered by the Japanese army in North China. Yan himself was forced to withdraw after having 90% of his army destroyed, including a large force of reinforcements sent into Shanxi by the central government. Throughout 1937 numerous high-ranking Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
, lavished praise on Yan for waging an uncompromising campaign of resistance against the Japanese.
Re-establishment of Yan's authority
Shortly before losing Taiyuan Yan moved his headquarters to LinfenLinfen
-Administrative divisions:The prefecture-level city of Linfen is divided in one district, two cities and fourteen counties. The information here presented uses the metric system and data from 2010 Census.-Pollution:...
, in southwestern Shanxi. Japanese forces halted their advance in order to focus on combating Communist guerilla unts still active in their territory, and communicated to Yan that they would exterminate his forces within a year, but that he and his supporters would be treated with consideration if they severed relations with the central government and assisted the Japanese in suppressing the Communists. Yan responded by repeating his promise not to surrender until Japan had been defeated. Possibly because of the severity of his losses in northern Shanxi, Yuan abandoned a plan of defense based on positional warfare, and began to reform his army as a force capable of waging guerilla warfare. After 1938 most of Yan's followers came to refer to his regime as a "guerilla administration".
Yan's intransigence obliged the Japanese to invade Linfen. Yan's defenses, under the command of Wei Lihuang, put up a stiff defense at Lingshi Pass, but were eventually forced to abandon the position when a Japanese column broke through a different pass and threatened Linfen from the east. Wei was successful in preventing the Japanese from seizing the strategic Zhongtiao mountain range
Zhongtiao Mountains
The Zhongtiao Mountains are a major mountain range located in the south of China’s Shanxi Province.Running from north east to south west the range connects with the Taihang Mountains to the east, overlooks the Yellow River to the south and faces the Fen River valley to the north west...
, but the loss of Linfen and Lingshi forced Yan to withdraw with what remained of his army across the Yellow River
Yellow River
The Yellow River or Huang He, formerly known as the Hwang Ho, is the second-longest river in China and the sixth-longest in the world at the estimated length of . Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai Province in western China, it flows through nine provinces of China and empties into...
, into neighboring Shaanxi.
In the spring of 1938 the Japanese redistributed many of their forces away from Shanxi, and Yan succeeded in re-establishing his authority, setting up a headquarters in the remote, mountainous district of Qixian
Qi County, Shanxi
Qi County, Shanxi is a county of Shanxi, China. It is under the administration of Jinzhong city.-References:*...
. The Japanese made several raids into southern Shanxi, but withdrew after encountering heavy resistance. By 1938, Yan's tactics had evolved to resemble the guerilla warfare practiced by Communist forces in other parts of Shanxi, and his defenses featured coordination with Communist forces and with regular divisions of the Nationalist army.
Yan's alliance with the Communists eventually suffered as tensions escalated between the KMT and CCP in other parts of China. Yan himself eventually came to fear the rapid power and influence that Communist forces operating in Shanxi quickly gained, and this fear caused Yan to become increasingly hostile to Communist agents and soldiers. These tensions eventually led to the breakdown of Yan's good relations with the Communists in 1939, when Yan began another offensive against the Japanese and attempted to wipe out the units of his army most friendly with the Communists by having them do most of the fighting. These units eventually rebelled against Yan, receiving assistance from the Communists, while soldiers aligned with the central government aided Yan. Yan eventually succeeded in driving the Communists and their sympathizers from the territory that he controlled, but most of the rural territory of northwestern Shanxi passed into the control of the Eighth Route Army. Yan's forces continued to battle the Japanese throughout 1940 as part of an indecisive guerilla campaign.
Negotiations with the Japanese
In 1940 Yan's friend, Tanaka RyukichiRyukichi Tanaka
-External links:*- Notes :...
, became chief of staff of the Japanese First Army, which was stationed in Shanxi. After Yan's animosity with the Communists became apparent, Tanaka began negotiations with Yan in the effort of inducing Yan to enter into an anti-Communist alliance with Japan. Yan agreed to send a high-level representative to meet with the Japanese, and obtained permission from the central government to negotiate with the Japanese for an agreement to remove all troops from Shanxi in exchange for Yan's cooperation. Perhaps because the Japanese were unwilling to meet these demands, Yan withdrew from negotiations in December, 1940, when Tanaka's superiors recalled him to Japan. Two months later the Japanese repeated their charge that Yan was a "dupe" of the Communists.
In May 1941 Tanaka Ryukichi returned to Shanxi and reopened negotiations with Yan, despite a general resistance from other Japanese military leaders in North China. Tanaka returned to Tokyo in August 1941, paving way for talks between Yan and General Iwamatsu, then the commander of the Japanese First Army in Shanxi. In the summer of 1942 Yan told the Japanese that he would aid them in their fight against the Communists if the Japanese withdrew a large part of their forces from Shanxi and provided his army with food, weapons, and CH$15 million of precious metals.
When Iwamatsu sent his chief of staff, General Hanatani, to Qixian for the purpose of delivering what Yan demanded, Yan called the Japanese concessions inadequate and refused to negotiate with the Japanese. This refusal is variously explained as Yan's resentment over the arrogance of the Japanese, his conviction that the Japanese would lose the war in the Pacific after he heard about the Battle of Midway
Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway is widely regarded as the most important naval battle of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. Between 4 and 7 June 1942, approximately one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea and six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy decisively defeated...
, and/or the result of a translation error that convinced Yan that the Japanese were using the negotiations as a ploy to ambush and attack him by surprise. Because they had allowed Yan to deceive them, Iwamatsu lost his command and Hanatani was reassigned to the Pacific.
After 1943 the Japanese began to negotiate with Yan clandestinely through civilian representatives (notably Yan's friend, Komoto Daisaku) in an effort to avoid being humiliated by him. Through Komoto's efforts Yan and the Japanese came to observe and informal ceasefire, though the terms of this agreement are unknown. By 1944 Yan's troops were actively battling the Communists, possibly with the cooperation and assistance of the Japanese. Yan's relationship with Chiang also declined by 1944, when Yan warned that the masses would turn to communism if Chiang's government did not improve considerably. An American reporter who visited Shanxi in 1944 observed that Yan "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.
Relationship with the Japanese after 1945
Yan Xishan was notable for his ability to recruit thousands of Japanese soldiers stationed in northwest Shanxi in 1945, including their commanding officers, into his army. He was recorded to have successfully used a variety of tactics to achieve these defections: flattery, face-saving gestures, appeals to idealism, and genuine expressions of mutual interest. In cases where these were not completely successful, he sometimes resorted to "bribes and women". His tactics in both convincing the Japanese to stay and in preventing them from leaving were highly successful, as the efforts of the Japanese were instrumental in keeping the area surrounding Taiyuan free from Communist control for the four years before the Communists won the civil war.Yan was successful in keeping the presence of the Japanese from American and Nationalist observers. He was known for making shows of disarming Japanese, only to rearm them at night. In one instance, he disarmed several units of Japanese, had a reporter take a picture of the stacked weapons to show that he was following orders, and then gave the weapons back to the Japanese. He once officially labelled a detachment of Japanese troops as "railway repair labourers" in public records before sending them, fully armed, into areas without railway tracks but full of Communist insurgents.
By recruiting the Japanese into his service in the manner that he did, Yan retained both the extensive industrial complex around Taiyuan and virtually all of the managerial and technical personnel employed by the Japanese to run it. Yan was so successful in convincing surrendered Japanese to work for him that, as word spread to other areas of north 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 totalled 15,000 troops, plus an officer corps that was distributed throughout Yan's army. These numbers were reduced to 10,000 after serious American efforts to repatriate the Japanese were partially successful. By 1949, serious casualties had reduced the number of Japanese soldiers under Yan's command to 3,000. The leader of the Japanese under Yan's command, Imamura Hosaku, committed suicide on the day that Taiyuan fell to Communist forces.
Civil war
After the Second World WarWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Yan's troops (including thousands of former Japanese troops) held out against the Communists during the Chinese Civil War
Chinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War was a civil war fought between the Kuomintang , the governing party of the Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China , for the control of China which eventually led to China's division into two Chinas, Republic of China and People's Republic of...
for four years. His forces held out until April, 1949, after the Nationalist government had lost control northern China, allowing the PLA to encircle and besiege his forces. The area surrounding the provincial capital of Taiyuan was the longest to resist Communist control.
The Shangdang Campaign
The Shangdang CampaignShangdang Campaign
The Shangdang Campaign was a series battles fought between the Communist force under the leadership of Liu Bocheng and the nationalist Yan Xishan’s Kuomintang force. The Campaign lasted from September 10, 1945, through October 12, 1945...
was an attempt by Yan (authorized by Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
) to re-assert control over southern Shanxi, where the People's Liberation Army
People's Liberation Army
The People's Liberation Army is the unified military organization of all land, sea, strategic missile and air forces of the People's Republic of China. The PLA was established on August 1, 1927 — celebrated annually as "PLA Day" — as the military arm of the Communist Party of China...
was known to be especially active. The total forces sent by Yan into southern Shanxi consisted of 35,000 of his provincial troops. The PLA contested this force with approximately 31,000 regular PLA troops, and were able to supplement this force with approximately 50,000 irregular militia soldiers, which were used mainly for logistical support and to maintain low-level suppression activities against already besieged (and stationary) forces. Yan's forces in general were much better armed and supplied than the forces fielded by the PLA at the time.
The PLA forces were led by Liu Bocheng
Liu Bocheng
Liu Bocheng was a Chinese Communist military commander and Marshal of the People's Liberation Army.Liu is known as one of the "Three and A Half" Strategists of China in modern history...
(later named one of the "Ten Great Marshals of the People's Republic of China"). Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy...
, China's future leader, served as Liu's political commisar. Yan's forces were initially led by Shi Zebo, and were later reinforced by Peng Yubin
Peng Yubin
Peng Yubin, Peng Yu-pin, , , was a Nationalist Chinese general.-Military history:In 1936 Peng led the 1st Cavalry Division in the Suiyuan campaign.In 1940 he was made Commanding General of the 1st Provisional Division....
.
Hostilities began on September 10, 1945. After initial engagements between Shi Zebo and Liu Bocheng's forces, Shi barricaded his forces inside the regional center of Chengzhi. Liu's army occupied the area surrounding Chengzhi, but was not able to take the city, leading to a stalemate. Peng Yubin's forces were sent to reinforce Liu's position. Peng was initially successful in defeating PLA detachments, but eventually his forces were led into an ambush, and were completely lost. During this time, Shi's forces attempted a breakout from Chengzhi, but were also ambushed and defeated on October 12, 1945.
Most of the PLA casualties in the campaign ooccurred when they attempted to confront Peng's reinforcements in an orthodox battle, allowing Yan's forces to successfully target Liu's forces with their superior arms. After these tactics failed, PLA forces were able to kill or capture both Shi and Peng's forces by leading them each into a series of well-orchestrated ambushes. Although both forces suffered the same amount of dead or wounded, 4,000-5,000, the Communists were able to capture 31,000 of Yan's troops, who surrendered once they fell into these ambushes. Of Yan's commanders, Peng Yubin was killed in action and Shi Zebo was taken alive as a prisoner of war.
The Shangdang Campaign ended with the Communists in firm control of southern Shanxi. Because the army fielded by Yan was much better supplied and armed, the victory allowed the local PLA to acquire much greater arms than had previously been available to them (including, for the first time, field artillery). It is said that the PLA victory in the Shangdang campaign altered the course of the ongoing Chongqing peace negotiations, allowing Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
to act from a stronger negotiating position. Their victory in the Shangdang campaign boosted the long-term prestige of both Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping.
By the winter of 1947 Yan's control of Shanxi was restricted to the area of northern Shanxi adjacent to Taiyuan. Yan observed that the Communists were growing stronger, and predicted that within six months they would rule half of China. After losing southern Shanxi Yan undertook preparations to defend Taiyuan to the death, perhaps in the hopes that if he and other anti-Communist leaders could hold out long enough the United States would eventually join the war on their side, saving his forces from destruction.
The Taiyuan Campaign
By 1948, Yan's forces had suffered a series of serious military defeats to the PLA, losing control of southern and central Shanxi, and were surrounded on all sides by territory controlled by the Communists. Anticipating an assault on northern Shanxi, Yan prepared his armies by fortifying over 5,000 bunkers, constructed over the rugged natural terrain surrounding Taiyuan. The Nationalist 30th Army was airlifted from Xian to Taiyuan to fortify the city, which was protected by over six hundred pieces of artillery. Yan repeatedly declared his intentions to die in the city during this period. The total number of Nationalist troops present in northern Shanxi by the fall of 1948 was 145,000.To overcome these defenses, Xu Xiangqian
Xu Xiangqian
Xu Xiangqian was a Chinese communist military leader.-Biography:Xu was born in Wutai county, Shanxi province, China. He was admitted to the Whampoa Academy in 1924 and held various officer ranks in the National Revolutionary Army between 1925 and 1927...
developed a strategy of engaging positions on the outskirts of Taiyuan before besieging the city itself. The first hostilities in the Taiyuan Campaign occurred on October 5, 1948.
By November 13, 1948, the Communists succeeded in taking the area around the eastern side of Taiyuan. The Nationalists suffered serious setbacks when entire divisions defected or surrendered. In one case, a Nationalist division led by Dai Bingnan pretended to surrender, but then arrested the Communist officers who entered Dai's camp to accept. Yan Xishan mistakenly believed the Communist leader of the arrested group, Jin Fu, was Hu Yaobang
Hu Yaobang
Hu Yaobang was a leader of the People's Republic of China who served as both Chairman and Party General Secretary. Hu joined the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s, and rose to prominence as a comrade of Deng Xiaoping...
. Yen airlifted the captured group to Chiang Kai-shek, who executed them after they failed to produce important information. Dai himself was rewarded with a large amount of gold for his actions, but was not allowed to be airlifted out of Taiyuan. After the city fell, he was captured, put on a well-propagandized show trial, and publicly executed.
Between November, 1948, and April, 1949, a stalemate was reached and there was little advancement by either side. Tactics used by the Communists during this time included psychological warfare, forcing relatives of the Nationalist defenders to the front to ask for the defenders' surrender. These tactics were successful as, from December 1, 1948, through March, 1949, over 12,000 Nationalist soldiers surrendered.
After major PLA victories in Hebei in late January, 1949
Pingjin Campaign
Pingjin Campaign , known as the Battle of Pingjin to the Nationalist Government, was part of the three major campaigns launched by the People's Liberation Army during the late stage of the Chinese Civil War. It began on November 29, 1948, and ended on January 31, 1949, lasted a total of 64 days...
, Communist armies in Shanxi were reinforced with additional troops and artillery. After this reinforcement, the total number of men under Liu's command exceeded 320,000 men, of which 220,000 were reserves. By the end of 1948, Yan Xishan had lost over 40,000 troops, but attempted to supplement this number through large-scale drafting.
Yan Xishan himself (along with most of the provincial treasury) was airlifted out of Taiyuan on March 1949 for the express purpose of asking the central government for more supplies. Yan left behind Sun Chu
Sun Chu
Sun Chu Sun Chu Sun Chu ( was a Kuomintang officer from Shanxi. He served in the warlord Yan Xishan's provincial army. He achieved a very high rank in Yan's army, eventually commanding Yan's entire military police force, but owed his high position more to his loyalty and trustworthiness than to any...
as the commander of his military police force, with Yan's son-in-law, Wang Jingguo
Wang Jingguo
Wang Jingguo was a KMT general from Shanxi. He was the son-in-law of the warlord who controlled Shanxi from 1911-1949, Yan Xishan. Wang served throughout his career in Yan's army, fighting in numerous campaigns.-Suiyuan:...
, in charge of most Nationalist forces. Overall command was delegated to Imamura Hosaku, the Japanese lieutenant-general who had joined Yan after World War II.
Shortly after Yan himself was airlifted out of Taiyuan, Nationalist planes stopped dropping food and supplies for the defenders due to fears of being shot down by the advancing Communists. The Communists, depending largely on their reinforcements of artillery, launched a major assault on April 20, 1949, and succeeded in taking all positions surrounding Taiyuan by April 22. A subsequent appeal to the defenders to surrender was refused. On the morning of April 22, 1949, the PLA bombarded Taiyuan with 1,300 pieces of artillery and breached the city's walls, initiating bloody street-to-street fighting for control of the city. By 10:00 am, April 22, the Taiyuan Campaign ended with the Communists in complete control of Shanxi. Total Nationalist casualties amounted to all 145,000 defenders, many of which survived as POWs. The Communists lost 45,000 men and an unknown number of civilian labourers that they had drafted, all of which were either killed or injured.
The fall of Taiyuan was one of the few examples in the Chinese Civil War in which Nationalist forces echoed the defeated Ming loyalists who had, in the seventeenth century, brought entire cities to ruins resisting the invading Manchus. Many Nationalist officers were reported to have committed suicide when the city fell. The dead included Yan's nephew-in-law, who was serving as governor, and his cousin, who ran his household. Liang Huazhi
Liang Huazhi
Liang Huazhi was a Kuomintang official who served in the warlord Yan Xishan's government. A relative of Yan, Liang rose rapidly through Shanxi's power structure, founding and leading a number of organizations dedicated to combating both internal and external threats to Yan's rule...
, the head of Yan's "Patriotic Sacrifice League", had fought for years against the Communists in Shanxi until he was finally trapped in the massively fortified city of Taiyuan. For six months Liang led a savage resistance, leading both Yan's remaining forces and those of the warlord's thousands of Japanese mercenaries. When Communist troops finally broke into the city and began to occupy large sections of it, Liang barricaded himself inside a large, fortified prison complex filled with Communist prisoners. In a final act of self-sacrifice, Liang set fire to the prison and committed suicide as the entire compound burned to the ground.
President of the Republic of China
In March 1949 Yan flew to the capital of Nanjing for the purpose of asking the central government for more food and ammunition, taking most of the provincial treasury with him, and did not return before Taiyuan fell to Communist forces. Shortly after arriving in Nanjing, Yan insinuated himself into a quarrel between the acting president of the Chinese Republic, Li ZongrenLi Zongren
Li Zongren or Li Tsung-jen , courtesy name Delin , was a prominent Guangxi warlord and Kuomintang military commander during the Northern Expedition, Second Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War...
, and Chiang Kai-shek, who had resigned from the presidency in January 1949. Although Chiang had resigned, many officials and generals remained loyal to him, and Chiang retained over US$200 million, which he did not allow Li to use in order to fight the Communists or to stabilize the currency. The ongoing power struggle between Li and Chiang seriously disrupted the larger effort to defend Nationalist territory from Communist forces.
Yan focused his efforts on attempting to promote greater cooperation between Li an Chiang. On one occasion Yan broke down in tears when attempting, at Chiang's request, to convince Li not to resign. He 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 eventually attempted to form a government, including both Chiang's supporters and critics, with Yan as premier. Despite Yan's efforts, Chiang refused to allow Li access to more than a fraction of the wealth that Chiang had sent to Taiwan, and officers loyal to Chiang refused to follow Li's orders, frustrating efforts to coordinate Nationalist defenses and to stabilize the currency.
By late 1949 the Nationalist's position had become desperate. The currency issued by the central government rapidly declined in value until it became virtually worthless. Military forces loyal to Li attempted to defend Guangdong
Guangdong
Guangdong is a province on the South China Sea coast of the People's Republic of China. The province was previously often written with the alternative English name Kwangtung Province...
and Guangxi
Guangxi
Guangxi, formerly romanized Kwangsi, is a province of southern China along its border with Vietnam. In 1958, it became the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, a region with special privileges created specifically for the Zhuang people.Guangxi's location, in...
, while those loyal to Chiang attempted to defend Sichuan
Sichuan
' , known formerly in the West by its postal map spellings of Szechwan or Szechuan is a province in Southwest China with its capital in Chengdu...
. Both forces refused to cooperate with each other, eventually leading to the loss of both regions. Yan's constant attempts to work with both sides led to his being alienated from both Li and Chiang, both of whom resented Yan for cooperating with either side. The Communists succeeded in taking all territory held on the mainland by the end of 1949, defeating both Li and Chiang. Li went into exile in the United States, while Yan continued to serve as Premier, in Taiwan, until 1950, when Chiang re-assumed the presidency.
Retirement in Taiwan
Yan's final years were filled with disappointment and sadness. After following Chiang to Taiwan he enjoyed the title of "senior advisor" to Chiang, but in reality was utterly powerless. Chiang may have held a long-term grudge against Yan due to Yan's activities on behalf of Li in Guangdong. On more than one occasion Yan requested permission to go to Japan, but was not allowed to leave Taiwan.Yan was deserted by all but a handful of followers, and spent most of his remaining years writing books on philosophy, history, and contemporary events, which he frequently had translated into English. Yan's late philosophical perspective has been described as "anti-communist and anti-capitalist Confucian utopianism". Several months before the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
Yan published a book, Peace or World War, in which he predicted that North Korea
North Korea
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
would invade South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
, that South Korea would be quickly overcome, that the United States would intervene on the side of South Korea, that the North Koreans would be pushed back to the Yalu River
Yalu River
The Yalu River or the Amnok River is a river on the border between North Korea and the People's Republic of China....
, that Communist China would intervene on the side of North Korea, that a stalemate would result, and that the Americans would retain a long-term presence in South Korea afterwards. All of these events occurred over the course of the Korean War.
Yan died in Taiwan in May 24, 1960. He was buried in the Qixingjun region of Yangmingshan. For decades Yan's residence and grave were cared for by a small number of former aides, who had accompanied Yan from Shanxi. In 2011, when the last of his aides turned eighty-one and became unable to care for the residence, the responsibility of maintaining the site was taken over by the Taipei City Government.
Legacy
After the civil war, Yan, like most Nationalist generals who did not switch sides, was demonized by Communist propaganda. It was not until after 1979, with new reforms in China, that Yan began to be viewed more positively (and thus, more realistically) as a pragmatic anti-Japanese hero. The contributions by Yan during his period in office are beginning to be recognized by the current Chinese government. One of his achievements, Yan's success in containing one of the epidemics in Shanxi, was cited recently by various Chinese governmental organizations as an example to follow to contain the bird fluH5N1
Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, also known as "bird flu", A or simply H5N1, is a subtype of the influenza A virus which can cause illness in humans and many other animal species...
and SARS
Severe acute respiratory syndrome
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is a respiratory disease in humans which is caused by the SARS coronavirus . Between November 2002 and July 2003 an outbreak of SARS in Hong Kong nearly became a pandemic, with 8,422 cases and 916 deaths worldwide according to the WHO...
epidemics in China, and was used to criticise of the incompetence of Chinese governmental officials in handling such epidemics.
Yan was sincere about his attempts to modernize Shanxi, and achieved success in some regards. Throughout his rule Yan attempted to promote social reforms that later came to be taken for granted, but which were highly controversial in his time: the abolition of foot binding; work for women outside the home; universal primary education; and, the existence of peasant militias as a fundamental unit of the army. Yan was possibly the warlord most committed to his province in his era, but was constantly challenged by his own dilettantism and the talents of his own officials.
Although Yan constantly spoke of the desirability and need for reforms, until the 1930s he remained too conservative to implement anything resembling the kind of reforms needed to successfully modernize Shanxi. Many of his attempts at reform in the 1920s had been attempted generations before, during the Tongzhi Restoration
Tongzhi Restoration
The Tongzhi Restoration was an attempt to arrest the dynastic decline of the Qing dynasty of China by restoring the traditional order. The harsh realities of the Opium War, the unequal treaties, and the mid-century mass uprisings of the Taiping Rebellion caused Qing courtiers and officials to...
. These Qing Dynasty reformers had found their reforms inadequate solutions to the problems of their time, and under the Model Governor these reforms proved equally unsatisfactory. During the 1930s Yan became increasingly open to radical social and economic policies, including wealth redistribution via graduated taxation, state-led industrialization, opposition to the money economy, an orientation towards functional (vs. "moral") education, and the large-scale assimilation of Western technology. Despite his adoption of Soviet-style economic policies and increasingly radical attempts at social reform, Yan was regarded as a "conservative" throughout his career, suggesting that the term "conservative" must be used carefully within the context of modern Chinese history.
After Yan's time Shanxi became of site of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
's "model brigade" of Dazhai: a utopian communist scheme in Xiyang County
Xiyang County
Xiyang County is a county of Shanxi, China. It is under the administration of Jinzhong city.-References:*...
that was supposed to be the model for all other peasants in China to emulate. If the people of Dazhai were especially suited for such an experiment, it is possible that decades of Yan's socialist indoctrination may have prepared the people of Shanxi for Communist rule. After the death of Mao, the experiment was discontinued, and most peasants reverted to private farming.
See also
- List of Warlords
- Shanxi cliqueShanxi cliqueThe Shanxi clique was one of several military factions that split off from the Beiyang Army during China's warlord era.Though a close associate of Duan Qirui, Shanxi's military governor, Yan Xishan, did not join Duan's Anhui clique. He kept his province neutral from the various civil wars the...
- Warlord eraWarlord eraThe Chinese Warlord Era was the period in the history of the Republic of China, from 1916 to 1928, when the country was divided among military cliques, a division that continued until the fall of the Nationalist government in the mainland China regions of Sichuan, Shanxi, Qinghai, Ningxia,...
- Central Plains WarCentral Plains WarCentral Plains War was a civil war within the factionalised Kuomintang that broke out in 1930. It was fought between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the coalition of three military commanders who had previously allied with Chiang: Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, and Li Zongren...
- History of the Republic of ChinaHistory of the Republic of ChinaThe History of the Republic of China begins after the Qing Dynasty in 1912, when the formation of the Republic of China put an end to over two thousand years of Imperial rule. The Qing Dynasty, also known as the Manchu Dynasty, ruled from 1644 to 1912...
- National Revolutionary ArmyNational Revolutionary ArmyThe National Revolutionary Army , pre-1928 sometimes shortened to 革命軍 or Revolutionary Army and between 1928-1947 as 國軍 or National Army was the Military Arm of the Kuomintang from 1925 until 1947, as well as the national army of the Republic of China during the KMT's period of party rule...
- Second Sino-Japanese WarSecond Sino-Japanese WarThe Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...
- Chinese Civil WarChinese Civil WarThe Chinese Civil War was a civil war fought between the Kuomintang , the governing party of the Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China , for the control of China which eventually led to China's division into two Chinas, Republic of China and People's Republic of...
- Xian Incident
- Chiang Kai-shekChiang Kai-shekChiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
- Yuan ShikaiYuan ShikaiYuan Shikai was an important Chinese general and politician famous for his influence during the late Qing Dynasty, his role in the events leading up to the abdication of the last Qing Emperor of China, his autocratic rule as the second President of the Republic of China , and his short-lived...
- Shangdang CampaignShangdang CampaignThe Shangdang Campaign was a series battles fought between the Communist force under the leadership of Liu Bocheng and the nationalist Yan Xishan’s Kuomintang force. The Campaign lasted from September 10, 1945, through October 12, 1945...
- Taiyuan CampaignTaiyuan CampaignTaiyuan Campaign was a campaign fought between the nationalists and communists for the control of Taiyuan, the provincial capital of Shanxi province during the Chinese Civil War in the post-World War II era, and resulted in the communist victory.-Prelude:...
External links
- The Yan Xishan Blog (Satirical blog purported to be written by Yan Xishan). Presently blocked by internet censors in mainland China.