Warlord Era

• 1. Introduction

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  The Warlord Era stretched across China from 1916 to 1928, a period when no single authority could claim to govern the country and where the line between soldier, bandit, and ruler blurred almost beyond recognition. It began with a death: Yuan Shikai, the man who had forced the last Qing emperor off the throne and taken the presidency for himself, died on the 6th of June 1916. What he left behind was not a republic but a vacuum. Into that vacuum rushed dozens of military commanders, each with his own army, his own territory, and his own idea of what China should be. The questions that follow are not just about who won and who lost. They are about how a country of hundreds of millions of people survived more than a decade in which the most powerful institution was a warlord's private army, and about what kinds of men those warlords actually were.

• 2. Roots in the Qing Collapse

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  Li Hongzhang's Huai Army, raised during the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864, was never fully disbanded after the fighting ended. That fact carries more weight than it might seem. When the Qing dynasty faced the Taiping rebels, it had no choice but to let provincial governors raise their own forces. The armies that emerged were unlike anything that had come before. Officers were never rotated. Soldiers were hand-picked by their commanders, and commanders by their generals. Units were composed of men from the same province, a policy meant to reduce the friction of dialects but one that quietly encouraged regionalist loyalties over any loyalty to the empire. The officers who came out of this system were loyal to their immediate superiors, not to Beijing. When the late Qing government attempted military modernization, it mobilized regional armies and militias with no standardization and no consistency. The northern Beiyang Army under Yuan Shikai received the best training and the most modern weaponry, which is precisely why it became the most powerful. When the Xinhai Revolution erupted in October 1911 with the Wuchang Uprising, soldiers across southern China mutinied and defected. Sun Yat-sen returned from exile to lead a provisional government in Nanjing. But the revolutionaries understood they could not defeat the Beiyang army; Sun negotiated with Yuan Shikai, handing over his presidency in exchange for an end to Qing rule. Yuan refused to move the capital south to Nanjing, insisting on Beijing where his power was secure. That decision shaped everything that followed.

• 3. How Warlords Actually Governed

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  "Warlordism did not substitute military force for the other elements of government; it merely balanced them differently." That observation from the source captures something essential about what these years actually looked like on the ground. C. Martin Wilbur identified what he called a dominant theme: that most regional militarists were "static", meaning their principal aim was to secure and hold a particular tract of territory rather than to conquer China outright. American political scientist Lucian Pye described warlords as "instinctively suspicious, quick to suspect that their interests might be threatened, hard-headed, devoted to the short run and impervious to idealistic abstractions." In 1921, the North China Daily News reported that in Shaanxi, robbery and violent crimes were so prevalent they frightened farmers off their land. Wu Peifu of the Zhili clique suppressed strikes by railroad workers by threatening them with execution. A British diplomat stationed in Sichuan witnessed two mutineers hacked to death in public, their hearts and livers displayed; another two were burned alive; others had burning candles inserted into cuts in their bodies before they were killed. Beneath the violence, a specific logic governed warlord alliances. When one commander grew too powerful, the rest allied against him, then turned on each other once the threat receded. This "alignment politics" kept any single figure from dominating the system. Even battlefield mercy had a strategic dimension: when Wu Peifu defeated Zhang Zuolin's army, he provided two trains to carry the defeated soldiers home. Wu understood that if Zhang were to defeat him in the future, he might count on the same courtesy. Nonetheless, betrayal was routine. Subordinate officers were regularly bribed with what the source calls "silver bullets", and warlords betrayed allies almost as a matter of course. Guo Songling, the leading general loyal to Zhang Zuolin, made a deal with Feng Yuxiang in November 1925 to revolt; the rebellion nearly toppled Zhang, who had to promise his soldiers a pay increase to win them back. Guo and his wife were both publicly shot; their bodies were left hanging for three days in a marketplace in Mukden.

• 4. Finances, Opium, and Inflation

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  In 1916 there were roughly half a million soldiers in China. By 1922 that number had tripled; by 1924 it had tripled again, producing more soldiers than the warlords could pay. Marshal Zhang, the ruler of industrialized Manchuria, took in $23 million in tax revenues in 1925 while spending some $51 million. The gap had to be filled somehow. Taxes called lijin were often confiscatory. In Sichuan province there were 27 different taxes on salt. One shipload of paper sent down the Yangtze River to Shanghai was taxed eleven separate times by different warlords, accumulating a total tax burden of 160% of the paper's value. One warlord imposed a 100% tax on railroad freight, including food, even during a famine in his own province. For Gen. Feng Yuxiang, the self-styled "Christian General" who publicly banned alcohol and promoted Methodism, the gap between image and practice was stark: he took in some $20 million per year from opium sales despite his ostensible anti-opium stance. Inflation offered another lever. Some warlords simply ran printing presses. The warlord who ruled Hunan printed 22 million Chinese dollars against a silver reserve worth only one million Chinese dollars in a single year. Zhang in Shandong province printed 55 million Chinese dollars against a silver reserve of just 1.5 million. Marshal Zhang Zuolin, illiterate and inclined toward reckless money printing, did not understand that he was himself the cause of Manchuria's inflation. His remedy was to summon the leading merchants of Mukden, accuse them of greed for raising their prices, have five of them selected at random and publicly shot, and tell the rest to behave better. Between 1925 and 1927, fighting in eastern and southern China caused non-military railroad traffic to decline by 25%, raising the prices of goods across the country and leaving warehouses full of unsold inventory.

• 5. Portraits of Power

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  Yan Xishan, known as the "Model Governor" of Shanxi, professed a creed that a friend described as merging democracy, militarism, individualism, capitalism, socialism, communism, imperialism, universalism, anarchism, and Confucian paternalism into one. That same friend described Yan as "a dark-skinned, mustached man of medium height who rarely laughed and maintained an attitude of great reserve; Yan never showed his inner feelings." He kept Shanxi on a different railroad gauge from the rest of China to make invasion difficult, though the same tactic also hindered the export of coal and iron, which were the province's main source of wealth. Wu Peifu, the "Philosopher General", had passed the Imperial Civil Service exam and fashioned himself as a defender of Confucian values, appearing in photographs with a scholar's brush in hand. He kept a portrait of George Washington in his office to signal a kind of democratic militarism. He was famous for his capacity to drink vast quantities of alcohol. When Wu sent Feng Yuxiang a bottle of brandy, Feng replied with a bottle of water, a message Wu failed to absorb. As a Chinese nationalist, Wu refused on principle to enter the foreign concessions in China; that stance ultimately cost him his life when he refused to go to the International Settlement or the French Concession in Shanghai for medical treatment. Zhang Zuolin, the "Warlord of Manchuria", was described as a graduate of the "University of the Green Forest", meaning he had been a bandit. Illiterate and forceful, he had risen from leading a bandit gang to being hired by the Japanese to fight Russians during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, and became the warlord of Manchuria by 1916. He controlled only 3% of China's population but 90% of its heavy industry. Writer Lin Yutang called Zhang Zongchang, the "Dogmeat General" of Shandong, "the most colorful, legendary, medieval, and unashamed ruler of modern China." Former Emperor Puyi remembered him as "a universally detested monster." His harem included women of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and French origin; he gave them numbers because he could not remember their names, and then usually forgot the numbers as well.

• 6. Armies, Mercenaries, and Peasant Resistance

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  In 1926, U.S. Army officer Joseph Stilwell inspected a warlord unit and found that 20% of the soldiers were less than 4 feet 6 inches tall, the average age was 14, and most walked barefoot. Stilwell recorded that this "scarecrow company" was worthless as a military unit. A survey of one warlord garrison in 1924 found that 90% of the soldiers were illiterate. Many rank-and-file soldiers were effectively bandits: one politician observed that when warlords went to war, bandits became soldiers, and when the war ended, soldiers became bandits. Soldiers captured in battle were routinely absorbed into their captors' armies; at least 200,000 men serving under Wu Peifu were prisoners he had incorporated into his own force. Because their soldiers could not operate or maintain modern weapons, warlords hired foreign mercenaries. Russian emigres who had fled China after the Bolshevik victory were widely employed. One claimed they moved through Chinese troops "like a knife through butter." The most feared Russian unit was led by Gen. Konstantin Nechaev, who served Zhang Zongchang in Shandong. In 1926, Nechaev's men drove three armored trains through the countryside, killing everyone they encountered and taking everything movable; the rampage ended only when peasants tore up the rail tracks. In 1926, Chinese warlord Sun Chuanfang reduced Nechaev's brigade from 3,000 men to only a few hundred by 1927. Against these forces, peasants organized into militant secret societies. The Red Spear Society performed secret ceremonies, then went into battle naked with supposedly bulletproof red clay smeared over their bodies. The Mourning Clothes Society would perform three kowtows and weep loudly before each engagement. The Iron Gate Society dressed entirely in white, the color of death in China, and waved fans they believed would deflect gunfire. All-female groups like the Flower Basket Society fought with swords and magical baskets said to catch their opponents' bullets.

• 7. The Northern Expedition and Its Aftermath

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  Sun Yat-sen accepted Soviet assistance to solve a problem he could not otherwise escape: his government in Guangzhou was always dependent on warlords who rivaled him for real power. The Soviets helped him build the Whampoa Military Academy and the National Revolutionary Army. Sun died on the 12th of March 1925, before he could use what he had built. Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Whampoa Academy, emerged as leader of the NRA and KMT. In 1926 he launched the Northern Expedition, which destroyed the Zhili and Anhui forces. Zhang Zuolin was assassinated by the Japanese in 1928. On the 29th of December that year, his son Zhang Xueliang accepted the leadership of Chiang's Nationalist government, completing the formal reunification of China and beginning what became known as the Nanjing decade. The reunification was more partial than it appeared. Most provincial leaders who joined the KMT were military commanders who had signed on only during the expedition itself; the warlords and their administrators were absorbed wholesale by Chiang rather than replaced. In 1930, the Central Plains War erupted when former warlords Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, and Li Zongren of Guangxi rebelled against Chiang. Regional warlord control remained a persistent problem for the Nanjing government through the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, and contributed to the Communist victory in 1949. Yunnanese warlord Lu Han, whose troops had received the Japanese surrender in Hanoi, defected to the CCP along with many others when it became clear the KMT's hold was failing.