The Warlord Era was the period in the history of the Republic of China between 1916 and 1928, when control of the country was divided between rival military cliques of the Beiyang Army and other regional factions. It began after the death of Yuan Shikai, the President of China after the Xinhai Revolution. He took power by leveraging his position as Prime Minister of the Qing Dynasty to force the Emperor’s abdication in exchange for the presidency. He quickly abandoned his promises of reform, working to dismantle the parliament and consolidate military power. As a result, following Yuan's death on 6 June 1916, a power vacuum was established and quickly filled by military strongmen, leading to widespread violence, chaos, and oppression. The Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government of Sun Yat-sen, based in Guangzhou, began contesting Yuan's Beiyang government based in Beijing for recognition as the legitimate government of China.
The most powerful cliques were the Zhili clique led by Feng Guozhang, who controlled several northern provinces; the Anhui clique led by Duan Qirui, based in several southeastern provinces; and the Fengtian clique led by Zhang Zuolin, based in Manchuria. The three cliques often engaged in conflict for territory and hegemony. In mid-1917, after Yuan's successor Li Yuanhong attempted to remove Duan as premier, the general Zhang Xun forced Li to resign and made a brief attempt to restore the Qing dynasty, which was quashed by Duan's troops. Feng became the acting president, but was forced to step down by Duan in late 1918 and was replaced by Xu Shichang. In mid-1920, the new Zhili clique leaders, Cao Kun and Wu Peifu, defeated Duan in the Zhili–Anhui War in an alliance with Zhang Zuolin. A power struggle broke out between Cao and Zhang, ending in Cao's victory in the First Zhili–Fengtian War in 1922. Li was briefly restored to an impotent presidency before being deposed by and in favour of Cao until 1924, when during the Second Zhili–Fengtian War, the latter was betrayed by his subordinate Feng Yuxiang, who joined with Zhang to stage a coup against Cao. Feng and Zhang shared power and recalled Duan to serve as president before they clashed in the Anti-Fengtian War that resulted in Zhang's victory. Duan was deposed and, after a series of short-lived cabinets, Zhang declared himself Generalissimo in 1927.
The warlords of southern China, who had cooperated against Yuan's dictatorship and Duan's attempt to extend Beiyang control to the south, were divided between Sichuan, Yunnan, Hunan, and Guangxi cliques, among others. In 1917, Sun Yat-sen created the Constitutional Protection Junta in Guangzhou to oppose the Beiyang warlords, but the southern warlords rivaled him for control, leading Sun to abandon it in 1918. In 1920, Chen Jiongming invaded Guangdong in the Guangdong–Guangxi War and gained control, after which Sun returned to Guangzhou. In 1922, Chen and Sun broke over political disagreements, after which the Yunnan and Guangxi warlords helped Sun regain power in 1923. To resolve the problem of being dependent on warlords, Sun accepted Soviet assistance in building a party and military infrastructure of his own, creating the Whampoa Military Academy and the National Revolutionary Army (NRA). After Sun died in 1925, the head of the Whampoa Academy, Chiang Kai-shek, 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, and on 29 December, his son Zhang Xueliang accepted the leadership of Chiang's Nationalist government, thus reunifying China and beginning the Nanjing decade.
Despite most acocunts of the era concluding it with the Northern Expedition of 1928, several warlords retained their influence during the 1930s and 1940s, resulting in events such as the Central Plains War of 1929–1930, in which the former warlords Feng Yuxiang, Yan Xishan of Shanxi, and Li Zongren of Guangxi rebelled against Chiang. Regional control by former warlords was problematic for the Nanjing government during the Second Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War, and contributed to the Communists' final victory in 1949. Other major warlords included the Ma clique in Gansu, Ningxia, and Qinghai; Liu Xiang and Liu Wenhui in Sichuan; Long Yun in Yunnan; Zhang Jingyao in Hunan; Zhang Zongchang and Han Fuju in Shandong; and Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang.
Terminology On December 28 1918, Chen Duxiu introduced the term Junfa () in an article for the Meizhou Pinglun () taken from the Japanese language word gunbatsu. It was not widely used until the 1920s, when it was taken up by left-wing groups to excoriate local militarists. Previously, these militarist leaders were known as a Dujun (), or provincial military governor, owing to the system Yuan Shikai introduced after he centralized power. The English transliteration of the term tuchun could be found in contemporaneous sources by 1917.
Origins
The origins of the armies and leaders that dominated politics after 1912 lay in the military reforms of the late Qing dynasty. During the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the Qing dynasty was forced to allow provincial governors to raise their own armies, the Yong Ying, to fight against the Taiping rebels; many of these provincial forces were not disbanded after the Taiping rebellion was over, like Li Hongzhang's Huai Army.Henry McAleavy, "China Under The Warlords, Part I". History Today (April 1962) 12#4 pp. 227–233; and "Part II" (May 1962), 12#5 pp 303–311.
Taiping rebellion Strong bonds, family ties, and respectful treatment of troops were emphasized.Maochun Yu (2002), "The Taiping Rebellion: A Military Assessment of Revolution and Counterrevolution", in David A. Graff & Robin Higham (eds.), A Military History of China 149 The officers were never rotated, and the soldiers were hand-picked by their commanders, and commanders by their generals, so personal bonds of loyalty formed between local officers and the troops, unlike Green Standard and Banner forces. The late Qing reforms did not establish a national army; instead, they mobilized regional armies and militias that had neither standardization nor consistency. Officers were loyal to their immediate superiors and formed cliques based on their place of origin and background. Units were composed of men from the same province. This policy was meant to reduce dialectal miscommunication, but had the side effect of encouraging regionalist tendencies.
Although the post–Taiping Rebellion governors are generally not recognized as the direct predecessors of the warlords, their combined military-civil authority and somewhat greater powers as compared to earlier governors provided a model for Republic-era provincial leaders. The fragmentation of military power due to the late Qing's lack of a unified military force, exacerbated by the rise of provincialism during the revolution, was also a strong factor behind the proliferation of warlords. Apart from administrative and financial obstacles, the late Qing government seemed to have relied on this divided military structure to maintain political control.
The rising necessity of military professionalism, with scholars becoming heavily militarized, led to many officers from non-scholarly backgrounds rising to high command and even high office in civil bureaucracy. At this time, the military upstaged the civil service. The influence of German and Japanese ideas of military predominance over the nation, coupled with the absence of national unity amongst the various cliques in the officer class, led to the fragmentation of power.
Xinhai revolution The most powerful regional army was the northern-based Beiyang Army under Yuan Shikai, which received the best in training and modern weaponry.Patrick Fuliang Shan, Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal (University of British Columbia Press, 2018, ) The Xinhai Revolution in 1911 brought widespread mutiny across southern China. The revolution began with the Wuchang Uprising in October 1911, where soldiers began to mutiny and defect to the political opposition. These revolutionary forces established a provisional government in Nanjing the following year under Sun Yat-sen, who had returned from his long exile to lead the revolution. It became clear that the revolutionaries were not strong enough to defeat the Beiyang army, and continued fighting would almost certainly lead to defeat. Instead, Sun negotiated with Beiyang commander Yuan Shikai to bring an end to the Qing and reunify China. In return, Sun would hand over his presidency and recommend Yuan to be the president of the new republic. Yuan refused to move to Nanjing and insisted on maintaining the capital in Beijing, where his power base was secure.
Yuan Shikai's control Reacting to Yuan's growing authoritarianism, the southern provinces rebelled in 1913 but were effectively crushed by Beiyang forces. Civil governors were replaced by military ones. In December 1915, Yuan stated his intention to become emperor of China at the head of a new dynasty. The southern provinces rebelled again in the National Protection War; but this time the situation was far more serious because most Beiyang commanders refused to recognize the monarchy. Yuan renounced his plans for restoring the monarchy to woo back his lieutenants; however, by the time of his death in June 1916, China had fractured politically. The North-South split would persist throughout the entire Warlord Era.
Yuan Shikai cut back on many government institutions at the beginning of 1914 by suspending parliament, followed by the provincial assemblies. His cabinet soon resigned, effectively making Yuan dictator of China. After Yuan Shikai curtailed many basic freedoms, the country quickly spiraled into chaos and entered a period of warlordism. "Warlordism did not substitute military force for the other elements of government; it merely balanced them differently. This shift in balance came partly from the disintegration of the sanctions and values of China's traditional civil government." During this period, there was a general shift from a state-dominated civil bureaucracy held by a central authority to a military-dominated culture held by many groups, with power shifting from warlord to warlord. A theme identified by C. Martin Wilbur was "that a great majority of regional militarists were 'static', that is to say that their principal aim was to secure and maintain control of a particular tract of territory." Warlord relations
Warlords, in the words of American political scientist Lucian Pye, were "instinctively suspicious, quick to suspect that their interests might be threatened, hard-headed, devoted to the short run and impervious to idealistic abstractions". Warlords usually came from strict military background, and were brutal in their treatment toward both their soldiers and the general population. In 1921, the North China Daily News reported that in Shaanxi, robbery and violent crimes were prevalent and frightened the farmers. Wu Peifu of the Zhili clique was known for suppressing strikes by railroad workers by terrorizing them with execution. A British diplomat in Sichuan witnessed two mutineers being publicly hacked to death with their hearts and livers hung out; another two being publicly burned to death; while others had slits cut into their bodies into which were inserted burning candles before they were hacked to pieces.