The Nature of the Chinese Foothold in Shansi, 1937-1938

Cambridge: Unpublished. Very Good. (1949). First Edition. Stiff Card Wrappers. 55 pages; A carbon typescript in a stiff brown card binding (two hole punch). At top of first page ink inscription: "for Phil Emerson." Some corners and edges trimmed, a taped over correction on one page and a few minor corrections in red pencil. The author Paul Oscar Elmquist was an Asian specialist with the Central Intelligence Agency. He was working for the U.S. Geological Survey, prospecting for uranium in the Southwest, when he enlisted in the Marine Corps and trained in Japanese language school as a combat interpreter. He was en route to Japan for his first deployment when World War II ended. He landed in Nagasaki and became part of the recovery efforts after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. After his discharge from the Marines, he received a master's degree in 1955 and a doctorate in 1962, both in Asian studies, from Harvard University. He moved to Washington in 1955 to work for the CIA as a Far East intelligence officer, with expertise as a geographer and mapmaker. The recipient of this paper was John Philip Emerson (?-1995) born in Salem, Mass. He served in the Army during World War II in Greenland, then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in Asian Studies. In 1950, Mr. Emerson joined the Mutual Security Agency under director William Averell Harriman and was stationed in Taiwan and worked on land reform policies. The purpose of the agency was, in the words of the Act, to organize "military, economic, and technical assistance to friendly countries to strengthen the mutual security and individual and collective defenses of the free world, to develop their resources in the interest of their security and independence and the national interest of the United States and to facilitate the effective participation of those countries in the United Nations system for collective security." In 1954 Emerson returned to Harvard, where he received a master's degree in China studies. In 1956, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship for study in Japan, where he married Akiko Pia Yamaguchi in 1958. During 1956 and 1957, as part of his studies of land reform, Emerson conducted a number of interviews with Yen Hsi-Shan (1883-1960), a warlord in Shansi Province, 1911-1949. Shansi was dubbed the "model province" because of Yen Hsi-shan's program of reforms. Shortly thereafter, they settled in the Washington area and Mr. Emerson began his career as a researcher with the Census Bureau's Center for International Research. Shansi is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the North China region. The capital and largest city of the province is Taiyuan, while its next most populated prefecture-level cities are Changzhi and Datong. The name Shansi means "West of the Mountains", a reference to the province's location west of the Taihang Mountains. Shansi borders Hebei to the east, Henan to the south, Shansi to the west and Inner Mongolia to the north. Shansi's terrain is characterised by a plateau bounded partly by mountain ranges. Shansi's culture is largely dominated by the ethnic Han majority, who make up over 99% of its population. Jin Chinese is considered by some linguists to be a distinct language from Mandarin and its geographical range covers most of Shanshi. Both Jin and Mandarin are spoken in Shansi. .