Warlords of the Republic

The word warlord, applied to early-twentieth-century China, has been used to cover almost every kind of regional strongman, from the bandit chiefs of the Henan hill country to the formally uniformed generals who commanded government armies in the name of the Republic. The term obscures more than it clarifies when applied across the whole period from the fall of the Qing to the Communist victory. A more useful approach is biographical. The men who actually ran the regional armies between 1911 and 1949 had careers that were specific, varied, and sometimes spectacular. Their training was mostly in the Qing military system. Their armies were mostly formed in the years around 1911 to 1916. Their patrons and rivals were mostly the people they had trained with at Baoding or who had served alongside them in the Beiyang Army. The biographical record shows that the warlord era was not a free-for-all of mercenaries and bandits; it was the politics of a small officer corps that had inherited a working imperial army and then lost the imperial state that had run it.

The first generation of warlords was the Yuan Shikai generation. Yuan had commanded the Beiyang Army, the new-model imperial force trained by the Qing after the Sino-Japanese War, and had remained its commander after the death of the empress dowager Cixi in 1908 and through the 1911 revolution. When the Qing abdicated in February 1912, Yuan negotiated the transition from empire to republic with Sun Yat-sen, became the first provisional president of the Republic, and assumed control of the Beiyang officer corps. The officer corps of roughly seven thousand men formed the political elite of the next decade. From it emerged the cliques that ran the Beijing government in succession: the Anhui clique of Duan Qirui, the Zhili clique of Feng Guozhang and later Cao Kun and Wu Peifu, and the Fengtian clique of Zhang Zuolin. The cliques were political families, not just armies. They shared a training, a regional base, and a habit of exchanging offices, of territorial armies.

The second generation was the Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan generation, who had also trained in the Beiyang system but came of age politically in the early 1920s. Feng had been a Beiyang officer who rose through the ranks by a mixture of evangelical Christianity (he was baptised in 1912 and remained a lay preacher for the rest of his career) and tactical brilliance. He became famous for switching sides, usually against his nominal patron, and was nicknamed the “Christian General” by Western reporters and the “Traitor General” by his contemporaries. Yan Xishan, the other major figure of this generation, was the long-serving governor of Shanxi, who ran his province from 1911 until 1949, an unbroken tenure of thirty-eight years that is one of the longest unbroken provincial rules in modern Chinese history. The third generation was the Chiang Kai-shek generation: officers who had not trained in the Beiyang system, but in the Whampoa Military Academy that Chiang and his Soviet advisers founded in 1924. Whampoa produced the National Revolutionary Army that fought the Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928. The Whampoa generation saw themselves as revolutionaries, not warlords, but their politics were warlord politics in important respects.

The 1911 to 1949 period can be read three ways. The first reading is that of the contemporary Chinese Communist Party, which treated the warlords as feudal remnants whose defeat was a precondition for national unification and whose legacies needed to be repudiated in the new China. The second is that of the contemporary Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which treated the warlords as obstacles to national unification that Chiang overcame in the Northern Expedition, but later made peace with as fragments of central control that could be managed under the Nanjing Decade. The third reading is the modern academic reading, which sees the warlords as a regional-military ruling class that filled the institutional vacuum left by the collapse of the Qing state, lasted longer than the Qing state had managed to last in its own late period, and ended only when the Japanese occupation of 1937 to 1945 and the Communist victory of 1949 destroyed the political conditions in which regional military autonomy had been possible. None of the three readings is wrong in full. None is sufficient on its own. The biographical approach is one way of holding the three readings together, because the men themselves were sometimes feudalists, sometimes modernisers, sometimes patriots, sometimes bandits, and usually several of these at once.

Yuan Shikai (1859–1916): the abortive emperor

Yuan Shikai was born in 1859 in Xiangcheng, Henan, into a family that had produced military officers under the Qing for several generations. He entered the imperial military service in the late 1870s and was sent to Korea in 1882 as a junior officer in the Qing garrison. He remained in Korea for twelve years, rising to be the Qing resident in Seoul, and was recalled to China in 1894 on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War. After the war he was held in semi-disgrace for several years, then returned to active service as commander of the newly formed Beiyang Army at Xiaozhan in 1898. The Beiyang Army was the Qing attempt to build a modernised force modelled on the Japanese imperial army. Yuan expanded it rapidly, trained it on German and Japanese lines, and used it to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. By 1908 Yuan commanded the largest single concentration of military force in China, and the regent, Prince Chun, forced him into retirement. He was recalled after the Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 and made prime minister of the imperial cabinet. He negotiated the abdication of the Qing in February 1912 in return for a structured transition that left the imperial household intact and Yuan himself as provisional president of the new republic.

Yuan was formally elected president by the provisional senate in Nanjing in March 1912, after Sun Yat-sen had stepped aside as provisional president under the terms of the negotiation. He moved the capital to Beijing and ruled from there for the next four years. His domestic programme combined a constitutional consolidation (a provisional constitution was adopted in 1912 and a more permanent one in 1914, both written largely by the legal scholar Cao Rulin), a modernisation of the army and the customs service, and a foreign policy that sought Chinese participation in the First World War on the Allied side. Yuan’s government arranged for Chinese labour recruitment to France in 1916 and signed the Sino-Japanese Twenty-One Demands of May 1915 in modified form. The Twenty-One Demands, which would have given Japan a position in Shandong, southern Manchuria, and eastern Inner Mongolia that was substantially the same as the German position before 1914, were the most controversial of Yuan’s foreign-policy decisions and remain a touchstone of nationalist historiography. Yuan’s defenders point out that the demands were negotiated down; his critics point out that they were agreed to in principle.

The end of Yuan’s career came in late 1915 and early 1916, when he attempted to restore the monarchy with himself as emperor. The Hongxian emperor, as he briefly styled himself, was opposed by his own generals, by the southern provinces that had been centres of the 1911 revolution, and by Japan. The Yunnanese general Cai E declared independence from Beijing in late December 1915 and organised the National Protection War. Other southern provinces followed. Yuan revoked the monarchy on 22 March 1916 and died of uraemia on 6 June 1916 at the age of fifty-six. The Beiyang officer corps then fragmented. The next four years saw the short presidency of Li Yuanhong, the restoration attempt of Zhang Xun in July 1917, the Anhui-Zhili wars of 1917 to 1920, and the establishment of the rival southern government at Guangzhou under Sun Yat-sen. The Republic of China that emerged from this turmoil was a confederation of regional armies that happened to share a flag, a nominal capital, and a provisional constitution, rather than a unitary state.

The Anhui clique and Duan Qirui (1865–1936)

Duan Qirui was born in 1865 in Anhui province, attended the Beiyang Army’s officers’ school at Tianjin, and served in Yuan Shikai’s command in Korea. He rose rapidly in the Beiyang system after 1901 and was a major general on the outbreak of the 1911 revolution. He was made a military governor of the Anhui-Beijing region after the establishment of the Republic, and he became premier in 1913 under Yuan. He served as president of the Republic from 1924 to 1926, having first served as chief executive in 1924, in the provisional government set up after the second Zhili-Fengtian War. He was the leader of the Anhui clique, the political faction that dominated the Beijing government from 1916 to 1920. The Anhui clique had two principal sources of power: the army units that Duan controlled in the central provinces, and the loans that he negotiated with Japan in exchange for nominal Japanese economic concessions in Shandong and Manchuria.

Duan’s principal legacy was his decision to enter the First World War on the Allied side in August 1917. He sent Chinese labour corps to France and to Mesopotamia. The Japanese, who were also on the Allied side, used the opportunity to extract the Shandong concessions from Britain and France at Versailles in 1919. The May Fourth Movement, which began on 4 May 1919 as a student protest at the decision to transfer the German concession in Shandong to Japan rather than return it to Chinese sovereignty, was a direct response to Duan’s diplomacy. Duan was forced out of the premiership in June 1919 by a combination of student protests and the disaffection of his own Zhili rivals. He attempted to return to power by force in the Anhui-Zhili War of July 1920 but was defeated. He retired to Tianjin, returned briefly as chief executive in 1924 and 1926, and died in Shanghai in 1936. The Anhui clique fragmented after 1920 but its army units continued to exist under various successors for most of the rest of the warlord period.

The Zhili clique and Wu Peifu (1874–1939)

Wu Peifu was born in 1874 in Shandong, the son of a small merchant family. He entered the Beiyang Army as a private in 1890 and rose through the ranks by a combination of personal talent and patronage. He became a protégé of Cao Kun, the Zhili clique leader, and was chief of staff of Cao’s army in the early 1920s. Wu was the field commander of the Zhili armies in the first Zhili-Fengtian War of 1922, which he won at the expense of the Fengtian army of Zhang Zuolin. He was the principal victor of the second Zhili-Fengtian War of October 1924, although the war was complicated by Feng Yuxiang’s Beijing coup of 23 October 1924 that overthrew the then-president Cao Kun and led to the establishment of a new provisional government. Wu was known in Western reporting as the “Philosophical Warlord” for his Confucian self-presentation, his personal austerity, and his habit of citing Confucius in army orders. The nickname is misleading: Wu was a serious military commander and an erratic politician, not a Confucian scholar.

Wu’s principal military accomplishment was the Huai River campaign of 1925, in which his armies defeated the remaining Anhui-clique forces in the central provinces and established Zhili control over the lower Yellow River basin. The campaign extended Zhili authority from Manchuria to the Yangtze, briefly making Wu the most powerful single military figure in China. The position was lost at Shankou Pass on 31 October to 2 November 1926, when the combined Fengtian, Anti-Wu, and KMT-aligned armies of the Northern Expedition trapped his main force in a snowstorm at the western end of the Great Wall. Wu’s army was destroyed. He retreated to the Yangtze, attempted to rebuild, was driven out of Wuhan by Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition in 1927, and spent the rest of his career in the inland provinces. Wu attempted a comeback as a Japanese collaborator in 1937 and 1938, was arrested by Chiang’s agents, and died in Beijing in 1939.

Zhang Zuolin (1875–1928): the Old Marshal

Zhang Zuolin was born in 1875 in Haicheng, Liaoning, into a poor peasant family. He was educated at a village school, learned to ride and shoot as a young man, and drifted into the bandit life of the Manchurian hill country in the 1890s. He served in the Russian-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 as a bandit-turned-soldier for the Japanese, and was recruited into the Beiyang Army by the Qing in 1908. He rose rapidly under the patronage of the Beiyang viceroy of Manchuria, Zhang Xiluan. By 1916 Zhang Zuolin commanded the Fengtian army, the Beiyang-aligned military force in the three Manchurian provinces. He became the military governor of Manchuria in 1918 and held the position, in various titles, until his death in 1928.

Zhang built the Fengtian army into the most disciplined and best-equipped of the regional armies. He used Japanese military instructors and Japanese-supplied equipment in the early 1920s, gradually substituting Chinese training for Japanese training as the decade went on. He developed the heavy industry of Manchuria through investment in coal, iron, steel, and armaments. The Hanyang Arsenal in Wuhan had been the principal armaments manufacturer of the late Qing; the Fengtian arsenal at Shenyang became the principal armaments manufacturer of the warlord era. Zhang lost the first Zhili-Fengtian War of 1922 and lost the second in late 1924, but he recovered each time, rebuilt his armies, and remained the principal figure in Manchurian politics until 1928.

Zhang’s death came on 4 June 1928 at Huanggutun, just outside Shenyang, when a bomb planted by KMT agents detonated under the railway bridge over which his train was crossing. The Japanese Kwantung Army had tolerated Zhang as a buffer state in Manchuria since 1905 but resented his drift toward the Nanjing government. The Kwantung Army did not itself organise the assassination, but the officers who did had Japanese military contacts and Japanese equipment. The death ended the first phase of Manchurian warlordism and opened the second: that of his son Zhang Xueliang and the period of Manchurian integration into the Nanjing state.

Feng Yuxiang (1882–1948): the Christian General

Feng Yuxiang was born in 1882 in Anhui, the son of a poor military family. He enlisted in the Beiyang Army as a teenager and rose to be a battalion commander by his early thirties. He was baptised as a Methodist in 1912 and remained a practising Christian lay preacher for the rest of his career, an unusual position for a Beiyang general. He built his army around evangelical Christian chaplains and required his soldiers to attend chapel. The nickname “Christian General” was coined by Western journalists in the early 1920s and was an accurate description of his public persona. Feng acquired a second nickname from his Chinese-speaking officers, “Traitor General,” which was also accurate: between 1911 and 1930 he changed his formal allegiance at least seven times, usually against his nominal patron, and usually in collaboration with the side that he had been fighting.

Feng’s principal political accomplishment was the Beijing coup of 23 October 1924. He marched his troops into Beijing, arrested the sitting president Cao Kun, ended the Zhili-Fengtian War in a single stroke, and invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing for a conference on national reunification. The coup removed the Zhili cliques’ hold on the Beijing government and opened the way for the Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928. Feng joined the KMT in 1926, was given nominal command of KMT-aligned armies in northwestern China, and established a regional base in Henan, Shandong, and Gansu that lasted until the mid-1930s. He commanded the Chinese army in the central China theatre of the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945 and retired to the United States in 1947. He died in a shipping accident in the Black Sea on his way to the new PRC in September 1948, in circumstances that have been debated ever since.

Yan Xishan (1883–1960): the Model Governor

Yan Xishan was born in 1883 in Wutai, Shanxi, the son of a small merchant family. He attended the Beiyang military school at Baoding, was sent to Japan for further training in 1904, and was one of the small group of Chinese officers who attended the Japanese Imperial Army Staff College between 1904 and 1909. Yan was appointed military governor of Shanxi in 1911 by Yuan Shikai and held the position, with several brief interludes, until 1949. His tenure of thirty-eight years is one of the longest unbroken provincial rules in modern Chinese history. He ran Shanxi through a programme of road-building, school construction, agricultural extension, and opium suppression that was unusual for the period. The Shanxi model of rural reconstruction was studied by Western and Chinese rural-development specialists through the 1930s and is the principal basis of Yan’s reputation as the “Model Governor.”

Yan’s political position was unusual. He was a Beiyang officer by training but not a member of any of the Beiyang cliques. He maintained Shanxi neutrality in most of the inter-clique wars of the 1920s by switching his nominal allegiance between Beijing and Nanjing at appropriate moments, and by running a particularly effective provincial army that discouraged invasion. He joined the KMT in 1928 in the course of the Northern Expedition but maintained effective autonomy over Shanxi until the late 1940s. He was a minor Japanese collaborator in 1941 to 1942 but withdrew from the collaboration after a year. He lost Shanxi to the Communists in 1949 and went to Taiwan, where he served as premier of the Republic of China from 1949 to 1950 and held a series of honorary positions until his death in 1960.

Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975): from Shanghai broker to Nationalist leader

Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887 in Xikou, Zhejiang, into a moderately prosperous merchant family. He attended a military school in Zhejiang and then, like many young officers of his generation, was sent to Japan for further training. He was in Tokyo when the 1911 revolution broke out and returned to Shanghai as a minor revolutionary officer. He became associated with the Shanghai Green Gang, the criminal organisation that ran much of the Shanghai waterfront, and supported the Shanghai capitalists Sun Yat-sen had cultivated. He was sent to Moscow in 1923 as a member of the “Three People’s Principles” mission to study Soviet party and military organisation, and returned to be commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy in 1924. Whampoa, founded by Sun Yat-sen with Soviet advisers, was the institutional centre of the KMT’s attempt to build a party-army on the Soviet model. Chiang ran Whampoa with a combination of Soviet training methods and Shanghai gangster methods, and produced the officer corps of the National Revolutionary Army.

Chiang launched the Northern Expedition from Guangzhou on 9 July 1926 and led the combined KMT-Communist armies north through Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and into the lower Yangtze in the first year of the campaign. The expedition won successive victories over the regional armies of the central provinces and reached the Yangtze in late 1926 and the lower Yangtze in early 1927. Chiang then turned on his Communist allies in the Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927, broke with the left wing of the KMT, and established a rival Nationalist government at Nanjing. The Nanjing government fought a long series of wars against the remaining Beiyang cliques, the new Fengtian-Baoding coalition, and the re-established southern government at Wuhan, before unifying most of China in 1928. The unification was nominal: the regional armies remained in their provinces under their regional commanders, but they accepted Nanjing as the central government and Chiang as the central commander.

Chiang’s principal domestic campaigns after the unification were the encirclement campaigns against the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi from 1930 to 1934, the Long March of the Communists in 1934 to 1935, the Xi’an Incident of December 1936 in which Zhang Xueliang detained him and forced him into a united front with the Communists against Japan, and the eight years of the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. After 1945 Chiang fought the Chinese Civil War, lost it in three stages in 1947 to 1949, and retreated to Taiwan with the rump of the Nationalist government. He ruled Taiwan from 1949 to 1975, presiding over the land reform, industrial development, and political authoritarianism that defined the early decades of the Republic of China on Taiwan. He died in Taipei on 5 April 1975 at the age of eighty-seven.

The Guangxi clique: Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi

The Guangxi clique was one of the most durable of the regional armies. Its political base was the Guangxi provincial army, which had been organised in the late Qing by a group of young Guangxi officers including Lu Rongting, Cen Chunxuan, and Li Zongren. The clique was dominated in the 1920s by the alliance of Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi, and Huang Shaohong, all of whom had attended the Guangxi military school and the Yunnan Military Academy in the late Qing and early Republic. Li was the political and diplomatic leader of the clique, Bai was its chief field commander, and Huang was its chief administrator.

Li Zongren was born in 1890 in Xiling, Guangxi, into a moderately prosperous family. He attended the Guangxi military school, served in the provincial army from 1911, and rose through the ranks in the early 1920s. He became military governor of Guangxi in 1924 and led the Guangxi armies in a series of campaigns against the Yunnan clique and the Guangdong warlord Chen Jitang. He joined the KMT in 1926 and led the Guangxi army in the Northern Expedition. He was elected vice-president of the Republic of China in 1948 and became acting president in January 1949 when Chiang resigned. Li attempted to negotiate with the Communists in early 1949 but refused to remain as a figurehead, went to the United States for medical treatment in November 1949, returned to Beijing in 1965, and died in 1969.

Bai Chongxi was born in 1893 in Lingshui, Guangxi, attended the Guangxi military school, and rose through the provincial army in the 1910s. He became chief of staff of the Guangxi army in the early 1920s and field commander of the army in the Northern Expedition. He fought the central China campaigns of 1927 to 1928 and the subsequent encirclement campaigns against the Communists. He commanded the Chinese armies in the battles of Hubei in 1938 to 1939 and the Hunan-Guangxi campaign of 1944 to 1945. He went to Taiwan with the rump of the Nationalist government in 1949 and held a series of honorary positions there until his death in 1966. Huang Shaohong, the third member of the Guangxi triumvirate, served as chief administrator of Guangxi and later as foreign minister of the Nationalist government. He died in 1936.

Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001): the Young Marshal

Zhang Xueliang was born in 1901 in Haicheng, Liaoning, the eldest son of Zhang Zuolin. He attended the Fengtian military academy in Shenyang and the Northeastern Military Academy, and inherited the Fengtian army on his father’s death in 1928. The inheritance was contested by several of his father’s subordinates, and Zhang had to negotiate, bribe, and occasionally fight his way to recognition. He accepted nominal allegiance to the Nanjing government and raised the Nationalist flag in Manchuria on 29 December 1928, ending the separate political existence of the Fengtian state. He was appointed commander-in-chief of the Manchurian armies by the Nanjing government and ran Manchuria as a special administrative region until the Japanese invasion of 1931.

The Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931 was the beginning of the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. Junior officers of the Japanese Kwantung Army, without authorisation from the Tokyo government, detonated a small charge on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden and used the resulting damage as a pretext for a full-scale invasion. Zhang received orders from Nanjing not to resist, lost Mukden and most of Liaoning in two weeks, and withdrew his remaining forces to southern Manchuria and into the Hebei-Shandong border. The League of Nations condemned the invasion in the Lytton Report of 1932 but was unable to reverse it. Zhang’s army was reconstituted in the interior as the Northeastern Army, nominally under the control of the Hebei warlord Song Zheyuan but substantially under Zhang’s own command. The army was transferred to Shaanxi in 1936 as part of the encirclement of the Communists. There Zhang staged the Xi’an Incident of 12 December 1936, in which he detained Chiang and forced him into a united front with the Communists against Japan. Chiang released Zhang on 25 December 1936 in exchange for the agreement to form a second united front, and held him under house arrest in Nanjing for the next fifty-four years. Zhang was released in 1979, moved to Hawaii in 1991, and died in Honolulu in 2001 at the age of one hundred.

Song Zheyuan (1885–1940) and Han Fuju (1890–1938)

Song Zheyuan was born in 1885 in Leling, Shandong, attended the Beiyang military school at Baoding, and served in the Beiyang system from the early 1900s. He commanded a division of the Beiyang army in the 1920s and was appointed military governor of Shandong in 1929 by the Nanjing government. He held the position until 1937 and was one of the most durable of the provincial governors of the Nanjing Decade. He commanded the twenty-ninth Route Army, the largest of the standing armies in the north China plain, and was responsible for the defence of Hebei and Shandong against the Japanese from 1933 to 1937. He lost the Battle of the Great Wall in 1933 and signed the Tanggu Truce of May 1933, which created a demilitarised zone south of the Great Wall. He fought a series of border engagements with the Japanese through 1935 to 1937, attempted to mediate between the Japanese and the Nanjing government, and was unable to prevent the outbreak of full-scale war in July 1937. He was wounded in a fall from his horse and died in 1940.

Han Fuju was born in 1890 in Hebei, attended the Beiyang military school, and served in the Beiyang system. He was given command of a division of Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian army in the 1920s, defected to the Nanjing government in 1929, and was appointed military governor of Shandong in 1930. He held the position until 1937. He commanded the third Group Army in the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War and was responsible for the defence of the lower Yellow River and the Tianzhu line in the summer of 1937. He retreated without orders from his superior Song Zheyuan and the strategic reserve in the winter of 1937, and was court-martialled, sentenced to death, and executed on 24 January 1938. The execution was carried out as a deterrent against further unauthorised retreats, and Han’s case became a reference point in the Chinese Civil War for the discipline of regional commanders.

Chen Jitang (1890–1954): the Guangdong warlord

Chen Jitang was born in 1890 in Fangcheng, Guangdong, attended the Guangdong military school, and served in the Guangdong army through the 1910s and early 1920s. He became a protégé of the Guangdong warlord Chen Jiongming, defected from Chen Jiongming after his break with Sun Yat-sen, and joined the KMT-aligned Guangdong army in 1925. He was appointed military governor of Guangdong in 1929 and held the position until 1936. He ran Guangdong as a relatively prosperous regional base, investing in road construction, military industry, and the Pearl River delta. The currency of Guangdong under Chen, the Guangdong provincial yuan, was one of the more stable provincial currencies of the period. Chen joined the KMT’s anti-Chiang coalition in 1931 and switched sides repeatedly through the early 1930s. He was expelled from Guangdong by the central government in 1936 in a combined military and political operation. He went into exile in Hong Kong, returned to the mainland after 1949, served as a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and died in Beijing in 1954.

Long Yun (1884–1962): the Yunnan warlord

Long Yun was born in 1884 in Qujing, Yunnan, into a Zhuang family. He attended the Yunnan military school, served in the Yunnan army from the early 1900s, and rose through the ranks during the Yunnan revolt of 1915 to 1916 against Yuan Shikai’s monarchy. He joined the KMT-aligned Yunnan army in 1927, was appointed military governor of Yunnan in 1928, and held the position until 1945. He ran Yunnan through a combination of anti-Chiang policies in the early 1930s, neutral accommodation in the mid-1930s, and active support for the central government during the Sino-Japanese War. He joined the Yunnan uprising of December 1945, in which three Yunnanese generals seized the provincial capital and declared allegiance to the Communists. The uprising failed militarily but marked the end of the Yunnan warlord era. Long was arrested by the central government in 1946, held under house arrest until 1949, pardoned by the new PRC government, served as a vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and died in Beijing in 1962.

Sheng Shicai (1897–1970): the Xinjiang warlord

Sheng Shicai was born in 1897 in Kaiyuan, Liaoning, into a military family. He attended the Whampoa Military Academy in 1924 and was sent to Xinjiang in 1930 as a KMT liaison officer. He staged a coup in 1933, became military governor of Xinjiang, and held the position until 1942. Sheng ran Xinjiang as a virtual independent state in the 1930s, balancing Chinese, Soviet, and British interests in the province. He opened the province to Soviet advisers in 1933, signed a Soviet loan agreement in 1935, and expelled the Soviet advisers in 1942 in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The expulsion was followed by a Japanese invasion from Inner Mongolia that pushed Sheng to request Nationalist troops from the east. He was replaced as governor in 1942 and went to Chongqing as a minister without portfolio. He remained in the mainland after 1949 and served the PRC government until his death in 1970.

The Ma cliques: Ma Bufang, Ma Hongkui, Ma Buqing

The Ma cliques were the family-based warlord networks of the Hui Muslim populations of Qinghai, Ningxia, and Gansu. They were organised as a loose federation of family networks under the broader Ma clan, with the principal figures in the 1930s and 1940s being Ma Bufang in Qinghai, Ma Hongkui in Ningxia, and Ma Buqing in Gansu. The cliques were unusual among the warlord networks in their religious cohesion, their long-term loyalty to the central government after 1928, and their effective administration of their provinces through the 1930s and 1940s.

Ma Bufang was born in 1903 in Moniwan, Qinghai, the son of Ma Lin, the previous military governor of Qinghai. He succeeded his father in 1931 and held the position until 1949. He ran Qinghai as a relatively prosperous provincial base, investing in road and railway construction, opium suppression, and military industry. He commanded the central government’s Qinghai-Sichuan forces during the Sino-Japanese War and was promoted to lieutenant-general in 1945. He went into exile in Saudi Arabia with his family in 1949 and died in 1975 in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Ma Hongkui was born in 1892 in Heshui, Gansu, the son of Ma Fuxiang, the most prominent of the late Qing and early Republic Hui generals. He was appointed military governor of Ningxia in 1930, lost the province to the Communists in 1949, and went into exile in the United States. He returned to the mainland in 1954 and served the PRC government until his death in 1954. Ma Buqing, the third of the three Ma generals, ran the Gansu portion of the network and commanded the central government forces in the northwest during the Sino-Japanese War. He went into exile in Taiwan in 1949 and held a series of honorary positions there until his death in 1975.

Conclusion: the long life of the Beiyang officer corps

The biographical record shows three things. First, that the warlords were not the residue of an older militarist culture but a particular generation of officers trained by the Qing in the years after the Sino-Japanese War. Their training was modern. Their armies were formed in a recognisable institutional pattern. Their politics were recognisable as a continuation of late-imperial military politics by other means. Second, that the warlord era was not a free-for-all but a politics of cliques that were defined by training and patronage rather than by region. The Zhili and Anhui cliques in the north, the Fengtian clique in Manchuria, the Guangxi clique in the south, the Shanxi warlords in the central mountains, the Ma cliques in the northwest, and the Yunnan, Guangdong, and Xinjiang cliques in the periphery were all variants of the same basic institutional pattern. Third, that the warlord era ended only when the Japanese occupation of 1937 to 1945 destroyed the political conditions for regional military autonomy and the Communist victory of 1949 destroyed the social conditions for any kind of regional autonomy. The warlords were not defeated militarily by Chiang Kai-shek; they were absorbed into the Nanjing government in 1928 and survived as provincial subordinates of the central state until 1949. The end of the warlord era was the end of a generation, not the end of an institution.

References

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