PBA Galleries

36 pp. Halftone portrait of Premier Yen Hsi-Shan. 18.2x13 cm (7¼x5"), printed wrappers.

The warlord Yen Hsi-Shan (now Yan Xishan), who served as Premier of the Republic of China during the end of its tenure on mainland China and the first year of its occupation of Taiwan, attempts to clarify the divisions, and is "pleased to find that the American Government has now come to understand the Chinese Communists as tools of Soviet aggression and therefore will no longer be deceived by them..." OCLC locates only two copies, at the University of Windsor (Canada), and the University of Malaya (Malaysia). 

Yan Xishan  was a Chinese warlord who served in the government of the Republic of China. He 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, he 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. He 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.