Wu Pei-fu, the 'Jade
Marshal' or 'Scholar Warlord', was the dominant commander in the Chihli Clique
throughout the early and mid-1920s. Wu was probably the best field general
during the Warlord Period, but politically he was relatively naive, and was
betrayed on several occasions.
After the death
of Yuan Shikai in 1916 unified military rule from Peking gave way to
disseminated military rule. Within a few months the country was divided into a
great number of what were known then as satraps, none of them stable or
lasting, all based on regional ties, all dominated by warlords. China had
become, as Sun Yat-sen had predicted it would, a sheet of shifting sand. Though
there continued to be national governments in Peking they wielded very little
power, and came and went with bewildering frequency.
China is a vast
and diverse country. The regional diversity is expressed in dialects, often
mutually unintelligible, in cuisine, in traditions and customs – and in
identity. Before there was an empire there were many independent states, whose
names survive in the alternative names of provinces (QiLu/Shandong,
ShuBa/Sichuan, Yue/Guangdong).
In the many
periods of disunity since the founding of the first state in the third century
BC, regional power holding always emerged to fill the void left by a collapse
at the center. The process of devolution and fragmentation was one that China
knew well. The most famous period of disunity came after the end of the Han
dynasty, when China was divided into three. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
(Sanguo yanyi), an immensely popular novel written more than 1,000 years after
the events it described (and almost certainly apocryphal), told of the anguish
of division and civil war through a string of stories of courage, treachery,
and intrigue. The stories were known to every Chinese, whether educated or not;
they appeared as opera plots, as oral stories, and in cartoons. Disunity was as
inevitable as unity, said the Three Kingdoms stories. Some people behaved badly
in times of troubles, others came into their own – but the evil men often won;
the most evil of all, Cao Cao, triumphed over the greatest strategist, Zhuge
Liang, a man of brilliance and humanity.
It may seem a
stretch to use a novel as a guide to understanding reactions to disunity and
uncertainty – but the mentality portrayed in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
had a formative influence on young men of the early Republic, men such as Mao
Zedong, who had all read the novel as boys. Theirs was a Three Kingdoms
reaction to disunity: think things through carefully, devise stratagems, and
know that the solutions will require force as well as intelligence. The answer
was to combine Zhuge Liang’s brilliance with Cao Cao’s ruthlessness.
Warlords and their armies
The rise of
regionalism and regional identities had been encouraged by the disappearance of
universal examinations in 1905, and by the loss of the law of avoidance. After
1916 the center’s ability to make appointments at the provincial level
disappeared, and regional rulers came to power, often soldiers, who called
themselves military administrators (dujun); other people called them warlords.
These men saw
disunity as opportunity for their particular regions. The negative reactions to
warlordism in the civilian world reflected the fear of chaos, of the country
falling apart – the fear that had haunted China’s rulers since the beginning of
the empire. This fear lived in the metropolitan world of the emperors and the
bureaucrats. It was not shared by warlords, men who focused on one region only,
nor by many of the people whose lives they controlled, whose horizons did not
extend beyond a region and its culture.
In the civilian
elite’s stereotype, a warlord was a deceitful, devious, illiterate man, sunk in
backward patterns of behaviour, uncouth and filthy. Zhang Zongchang, the
“Dog-Meat General,” who ruled Shandong for many years, fitted the stereotype.
He was uneducated, a bandit by origin, loud-mouthed, cruel. His proudest
“possession” was his large harem, in which there were women from China, Japan,
Russia, and western Europe. He lived by violence, he lost his power by
violence, and he died violently (after he had lost power), shot at the station
of his former capital, Jinan.
Few warlords were
as awful as Zhang. Some were progressive figures, complex men who blended
self-interest with a genuine interest in the future of China. The most famous
of this type was Feng Yuxiang, a mass of contradictions, blunt and devious, a
personal power seeker and devout nationalist.
Other warlords
were local strongmen who looked after their own regions, and in some cases gave
them the most secure and stable periods of rule they were to know in many
decades. In Shanxi, Yan Xishan, who ruled the province for more than three decades,
is remembered as a model ruler; in Guangdong, Chen Jitang, who controlled the
province for most of the 1930s, is considered a local hero; in Guangxi, the
rulers of the province from 1925 to 1949, the “Guangxi Clique,” are revered for
their martial spirit, which gave the province the name of “China’s Sparta.”
Tuzi buchi wobian
cao. “The rabbit doesn’t eat the grass beside its nest.” Source: traditional
The better
warlords understood the old proverb about a rabbit not eating the grass beside
its own burrow, and they tended to show concern for the people of the region
they controlled. They provided stable government, which, even though it came
with tax swindling and rampant corruption, was preferable to chaos or anarchy.
Tax income stayed in the region – except for the amounts that warlords salted
away in Tianjin, Shanghai, or Hong Kong (cities under foreign control) – for
the time when their rule came to an end.
The men referred
to as “petty warlords” did the most damage to Chinese society. They really were
bandits, uncouth and crude. They exploited and vandalized the regions they
controlled. Their rule was often short. When they were overthrown by other warlords
they went back to banditry or joined local militias.
The number of men
under arms expanded dramatically in the early Republic. By the early 1920s
there were at least 1.5 million soldiers, and an equally large number of armed
men not serving in formal military units – irregulars, militiamen, bodyguards,
and bandits. There was a twoway traffic between the organized and the informal
armed worlds.
Warlordism had a
strongly inhibiting effect on one aspect of Chinese society where there might
otherwise have been change. The emancipation of women, which had just begun in
China’s cities, was impossible in areas under indifferent or bad warlord
control. Girls had to be protected by their families from the unthinkable –
rape – and so many of them lived cloistered lives at home.
The warlord
system provided immense numbers of jobs – either directly, as soldiers, or
indirectly, in the manufacturing and service industries that catered to the
military. The continuing growth of China’s population facilitated the expansion
of the military. As the population grew, employment opportunities did not. Most
of the jobs in the new factories were for young women. There were more and more
young men in the rural areas for whom there was no work. A few could emigrate –
to Manchuria, Southeast Asia or North America – but the closed nature of
migration flows limited this solution to a few regions of China, all of them
coastal.
Young men from
regions with no established migration chains had only a few opportunities for
off-farm employment – peddling, moving to the city, or going into the military.
Warlord finances
The foreign
banks, like the concessions, contribute largely to the amenity of Chinese civil
war and political strife. Once loot is turned into money and deposited with
them by the looter, it is sacred and beyond public recovery. Cases have been
known in which generals, far from expecting interest on their deposits, have
been eager to pay the banks a small percentage for the privilege of being
allowed thus to cache their gain. At a town up the Yangtze [Yangzi], a Chinese
military commander visited the American- Oriental Bank and said that he wished
to deposit with them, instead of in his own headquarters, what he politely
called his records, and left thirty large trunks with the bank. He was
presently defeated, and the bank manager was a little disturbed as to what he
should do if the incoming conqueror were to demand that these records be handed
over. But the in-coming conqueror felt equally insecure, and was more concerned
to get his own records safely in to the bank than to obtain those of his enemy.
Another huge batch of trunks was brought in, and the bank manager, much
relieved, had both sets of trunks piled one beside the other.
Arthur Ransome,
The Chinese Puzzle (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), pp. 123–4.
