Talk:Yan Xishan

POV

The article, particularly when it came to the Civil War campaign, reads like PRC propaganda. If someone who is more familiar with the subject can NPOV-ize it, that would be appreciated. --Nlu (talk) 00:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I've made a serious effort to research, add to, and edit this article for NPoV. Remaining areas of weakness include most of Yan's life after 1945, especially the "Central Shanxi Campaign", for which I can find very few sources.Ferox Seneca (talk) 00:56, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Biased POV

It was mentioned that the article was biased before, and the article seems to have swung the opposite direction. This now reads like single-minded effusive praise for the man. I can't find a single criticism of Yan and his policies that doesn't deflect to the officers under him.

Also there is quite a lot of pro-KMT propaganda now. For example, " 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." How is this self-sacrifice? What was gained? This is just using flowery language to conceal a war-crime. 173.180.75.162 (talk) 03:22, 10 August 2020 (UTC) a casual reader passing by- 8.9.2020

Nearly all of the article is cited, and the perspectives of the article reflect the perspectives of the sources used. The section sourced to Spence above is very close to how it is described in the original source. The biggest criticisms that I could find of Yan in the literature seemed to be that he had a tendency towards dilettantism in the implementation of his ideas and that he was a mediocre military commander, which I think is reflected in the article. Can you find third-party sources with an alternative perspective?Ferox Seneca (talk) 09:08, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Pro-Yan Xishan bias?

It has come to my attention that the phrase "Yan Xishan Thought" is not mentioned anywhere else before this article was created, I do not know about Yan Xishan enough to know whether this is accurate, but because this phrase isn't used by any historian I feel it might be innacurate. "Yan Xishan Thought" sounds like a glowed up version of "Ideology" or "Political Stances" made to sound as if he created this Ideology.

As I am not the only one who brought up that the article is biased I believe there is an underlying problem with the article. BonkeySmoke (talk) 14:35, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Seconding this, the term "Yan Xishan Thought" also doesn't appear anywhere in the original book and article by Donald G that is cited for the descriptions of Yan Xishan's ideology in the article. 83.248.123.87 (talk) 15:12, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

• Donald Gillin, my apologies 83.248.123.87 (talk) 15:13, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

I am reading articles about Yan Xishan right now to verify this article. I have not read enough to reach a concrete conclusion, but even without any knowledge about the subject one could see how the writing of this article is iffy. For example:

"...he [Yan] survived the machinations of Yuan Shikai, the Warlord Era, the Nationalist Era, the Japanese invasion of China and the subsequent civil war" from the opening paragraph.

Machinations is usually with bad connotations, which is inherently biased, whose to say whether Yuan Shikai was bad? That is up to interpretation of the reader, not the writer of the article.

"It was not until after 1979, with new reforms in China, that he [Yan] began to be viewed more positively (and thus, more realistically) as a pragmatic anti-Japanese hero." from the legacy section.

I'm sorry? "began to be viewed more positively (and thus, more realistically)" is downright insulting, It doesn't even mean or expand on anything, it's just there to make him look better.

I also want to bring up the valid point user 173.180.75.162 made in a previous discussion again as another example of the weird almost whitewashing that appears in this article. BonkeySmoke (talk) 12:24, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

I wrote most of this article. The term "Yan Xishan thought" is cited to the book that Gillin wrote, not either of the JSTOR articles he wrote. Unfortunately, I am not aware of whether an online version of that book exists for me to provide a link: when I wrote this article I had checked it out from my university's library. The book goes into some detail to describe the ideology that Yan attempted to create after he took control of Shanxi, and calls this ideology "Yan Xishan thought". The term is probably an Anglicisation of "閻錫山主義". I also have never seen the term used anywhere else, though this is probably just because there are no real English-language biographers of Yan other than Gillin.

If the term "machinations" seems NPOV to you, then change it, though I think it describes what actually occurred.

The passage about Yan "realistically" being re-evaluated by the modern Chinese government predates my rewriting of the article, when the majority of it was wholly un-cited. This paragraph originally ended in a sentence about how the Chinese media had praised Yan for his epidemic prevention efforts during the 1997 bird flu scare. I remembered that one of my Chinese history professors had also mentioned this media event once in a lecture, so I left the passage up because I thought it was probably true, even though I could not find the original source for it.Ferox Seneca (talk) 16:03, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

I possess Gillin's works and my repeated issue with the article has been that I have never been able to find this exact phrase in any of them (there's versions digitised online, you can rent them from archive.org for instance if you want to compare). The term "閻錫山主義" that you refer appears to have some use within Chinese academia, but "中的哲学" (philosophy of China) seems far more common. Its also the term that the Chinese version of this article uses. I'm not really familiar with Wikipedia editing or the norms here, but as far as I can tell the exact term "Yan Xishan Thought" originates from this Wikipedia article and has then spread into wider academic discourse. I will have to defer to more experienced editors about what to do with the matter though, just wanted to give my two-cents on the matter. 83.248.123.87 (talk) 21:46, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the term "Yan Xishan Thought" is a translation/angliciation of "閻錫山主義". This styling is commonly used in Chinese, with one of the latest being "Xi Jinping Thought". It's just a general term used for someone's modus operandi and doesn't necessarily glorify anything. 64.189.18.29 (talk) 13:40, 18 April 2024 (UTC)