China Devolved Into Cliques Led By Warlords

The Anhui Clique, the Zhili Clique, the Fengtian Clique...were these just bosses and bandits?

Southern China had not really unified with northern China after Yuan Shikai’s death.  Its preferred President, Li Yuanhong had succeeded Yuan as President.  But Li had quickly faced a power struggle with Duan Qirui of the Anfu Clique.  Parliament, restored following Yuan’s death, and with the KMT party out of the shadows, voted with Li and against Duan.  But the brief attempted restoration of the Qing Dynasty in 1917 in Beijing was put down by Duan Qirui.  So, by the end of 1917, Li was out, Duan was in and the Anfu Clique was firmly in charge in Beijing, in north China.

In July 1917, Sun Yat-sen arrived in Guangzhou in south China from Shanghai and encouraged members of parliament to join him and form a new government there.  About 100 members of Parliament joined.  They voted to form a military government there to protect the original 1912 constitution.

Sun Yat-sen was elected Generalissimo.  The Admiral of the First Fleet, as well as the national Naval Minister supported the movement by arriving with nine ships from the Chinese First Fleet.  He then became Naval Minister of the southern military government.  Generals from Yunnan and Guangxi were selected as Marshals.  Leaders in Hunan also supported the Constitutional Protection Movement. 

Duan Qirui’s government responded by attacking Hunan.  They failed and troops from Guangxi helped to defeat the northern invasion.  This was in 1917 and the failure caused Duan Qirui to briefly resign and Feng Guozhang of the Zhili Clique replaced him. Feng had some support in the south, especially among the Guangxi generals, who preferred him to Duan Qirui.  But Duan was powerful and was Premier three different times during the First World War.  He was also Commander-in-Chief of the Anfu Clique and had considerable power even when not serving as Chinese Premier.

The Zhili clique and Anhui Cliques were both made up of former members of the Beiyang Army and had been followers of Yuan Shikai.  Each now had his own view and they had different regional power bases.

Generally, the Zhili Clique had more to lose from an all-out war with the south as battles would be expected to occur in their heartlands.  So, the Zhili Clique generally preferred negotiations and compromise with the south, while the Anhui or Anfu Clique (the same organization by two different names) generally preferred to invade and eradicate the southern leadership.

Wu Peifu, sometimes called the Jade Marshal, and a member of the Zhili Clique was ordered south to Hunan to attack and take control of it.  He is generally considered one of the ablest of the warlords and the most praiseworthy. 

Wu had passed a degree in the old Qing examination system and then moved into the military system in Shandong province.  He graduated from the Baoding Military academy, which was under Yuan Shikai’s leadership. He was then an officer under General Cao Kun, who later was the formal head of the Zhili Clique.

Wu had helped to put down the Manchu restoration in Beijing in 1917 and was able to achieve victories in Hunan.  But it was a hard fight and his troops disliked the rain, flooding, food shortages and epidemics they encountered during the campaign.  Wu was unimpressed with the constant infighting in Beijing.  He stopped his advances in Hunan and called for negotiations with the south.  Wu publicly criticized Duan Qirui for siding with the Japanese rather than their fellow Chinese in the south. 

Wu went so far as to say that the Beijing government was “erroneously listening to the voices of traitors”.  He went on to criticize Japan directly and said “The Japanese want to take advantage of our distress to mobilize their troops, and an agreement that will humiliate China has already been drawn up...The civil war has gone on for over a year.  Chinese are borrowing money to kill other Chinese...”.

This gained Wu friends in the south and among patriots, but it caused real problems for him in Beijing.  Not only with Duan Qirui who would have been furious, but also with Cao Kun, his superior.  Wu admitted that normally the job of a soldier was to obey orders, but this was an exceptional case.

Various generals and warlords criticized him, but they respected him enough not to attack him.  Instead, Beijing cut off his funds and his troops and he were not paid for their last eight months in Hunan.  The southern leaders gave him some funds to defray his costs and he left and travelled north to a defensible spot around Luoyang on the Yellow River in Henan Province. 

He dressed simply and did not have any visible luxuries in his office. 

During the May Fourth Movement, Wu was the warlord who most supported the students and protesters.  He too participated in the telegraph campaign urging Wellington Koo and the Chinese negotiators in Versailles not to sign the treaty which handed Shandong to the Japanese.

Its worth noting that the southern government also sent representatives to the Versailles Conference.  There were diplomats from northern and southern China there, each reporting to their own governments in Beijing and Guangzhou.  The southern government was opposed to the Japanese takeover of Shandong and received no support from Japan, so they did not take convincing to reject the Versailles Treaty.

Meanwhile, the southern forces were more controlled by southern warlords like the Guangxi Clique than by Sun Yat-sen.  They forced him out as Generalissimo and he retired again, this time to write and to develop his ideas on The People’s Three Principles.  This won’t be the last time that I’ll talk about Sun Yat-sen.  He will be back, and I’ll have more to say about his philosophy and those People’s Three Principles then.

In Beijing, the President Feng Guozhang, a Zhili leader, died and was replaced by Xu Shichang, who was pro-Japanese and part of the Anfu Clique.  Tensions were considerable between the Anfu and Zhili Cliques and Duan Qirui wanted war. 

The Zhili Cliques brought up its commanders and soldiers from Henan and Hubei, including Wu Peifu. 

The Anfu-Zhili war broke out in July 1920. The Anfu side, which called itself the National Stabilization Army, scored some early victories and the Zhili soldiers were pushed back in a few spots, including about 50 miles or 80 kilometres southwest of the capital.

But Wu was a clever commander.  His side was called the Traitor Suppression Army and made a swift move that penetrated his enemy’s right flank.  He separated the defender’s forces.  He then was able to take a commander prisoner and the Anfu troops panicked.  Some other commanders surrendered and their troops ran.  Even the presidential bodyguard collapsed.   It was a rout. 

The Manchurian Warlord, Zhang Zuolin, had moved south to where the Great Wall of China meets the Yellow Sea. That was the southern end of an important railroad into Manchuria.  Zhang now joined in and announced that he would support the Zhili side.

He forced some of the Anfu troops to surrender.  Duan Qirui resigned as Premier.  Zhili and Manchurian troops occupied Beijing and formed a new administration.  This worked well for Zhang and his Fengtian Clique, so named because his main stronghold was in Fengtian, one of the three provinces of Manchuria.  He now gained control of Inner Mongolia as his prize.  Zhang had built up his powerbase over years in the northeast and had accepted aid and weapons from Japan.  With Duan Qirui gone, Japan now placed its hopes in Zhang.

Almost immediately, tensions built between the Zhili and Fengtian Cliques, but also within the Zhili Clique, especially between Wu Peifu and his nominal boss Cao Kun.  I’ll have more to say on that another time.

But now I thought it would be worth looking at what life was like for the little people in China.  So far, a lot of talk has been about presidents, premiers and generals.  What was life like for ordinary Chinese during this Warlord Era?

In short, terrible.

First of all, all these soldiers and commanders needed lodging, food, supplies and pay.  As we heard with Wu Peifu’s army in Hunan, pay was often late.  Sometimes, it wouldn’t come at all.  Then, soldiers would pillage instead.  I’m not speaking about Wu’s troops in particular.  He was considered one of the best generals.  Most of the other warlords were poorly educated, often illiterate and keen on extracting as much wealth as possible.

One way they did that, of course, was through taxes.  If they controlled a territory as military and civilian governor, then they could control the usual tax system.  They usually supplemented that with additional taxes on everything from opium to vegetables.  They would charge tolls for goods travelling through their area.  They also could earn from businesses operating in their area.  The warlord of Shanxi, for instance, did well from coal mining in his province. 

In Guangxi, the warlords gained revenue from a toll on goods like opium travelling through the province.  Their province was between the opium and mining areas of Yunnan and the big cities and ports of Guangdong province.  These tolls help keep taxes relatively low in Guangxi for a while and helped their leaders be more popular than otherwise, until that easy cash cow stopped when the route changed.

One of the problems for common people was that when a new leader moved in, whether it was at the provincial level or local level, often they would demand 2-3 years taxes in advance.  Unfortunately, armies came and went quickly.  In some cases, by the 1930s, ordinary taxpayers had prepaid taxes for 60-70 years...if they had the funds.  If not, then whatever they had of value might have been carried off.

In the bigger cities like Shanghai or Guangzhou, the warlords could benefit from a share of revenues from vices like prostitution. 

In most provinces, warlords also resorted to printing money or minting their own coins.  This would only help in the very short run, as it quickly caused inflation.  For example, Manchurian paper money went from being worth almost one silver dollar in 1917.  By 1927, that paper was only worth a tenth as much in silver.  It would take 10 bills to buy the same amount of silver after those 10 years. 

The warlords were sure to stash their funds in western bank accounts, usually in foreign concessions, or in property in those same concessions.  If they lost a war, they would often spend some time in those concessions or overseas before looking for a chance to return.  Duan Qirui and the Anfu Clique lost the war in 1920, but Duan will be back too.

In the villages and on the farms, ordinary folk were squeezed by everyone.  Those in charge, of course took their taxes, which increased tremendously during this period and often had to be paid on short notice or for years at a time.  But the wars also led to destruction of farms and businesses and there were lots of unemployed. Many turned to banditry.

Banditry was not new in China.  In a country with a lot of people and not enough land, there was often surplus labour especially outside of peak farming season.  The same men might harvest a crop for a month and then form bandit gangs that would raid another area for food or what they could carry.

Bandits might descend on an area, which was a burden for those farmers or villagers.  But often the army that would come after was even worse.  They had their own demands for putting down the bandits and usually weren’t that interested in actually stopping banditry, since that was their reason for a job in the first place. 

Bandits and armies often worked symbiotically.  Armies could grow by incorporating bandits.  And bandits could get weapons by exchanging them for money or food with soldiers. 

In one case in Manchuria, bandits took a western doctor hostage who later told the story.  Most of them had treatable injuries, like bullet wounds or hard growths on their eyelids.  Many were addicted to opium.  Some recited the Confucian classics at night around the campfire.  Some asked him for a way to emigrate.  When soldiers did approach, they knew the names of each of the bandits and their home villages, which scared them.  But negotiations for the bandits to turn over the doctor in exchange for joining the army and getting opium fell through.  The doctor was eventually freed by soldiers and one bandit later wrote to the doctor to let him know the gang had broken up and that he was looking for work.

In some cases, businesses or gentry might hire their own protection armies or pay protection money to a local group.

There basically was no good government anywhere and if you couldn’t earn enough to live where you were, you might become a bandit or soldier yourself.

Why does this matter?  Not only does this help explain what happened after in China.  How ordinary people were completely fed up with the situation and could be mobilized.

It also is a pattern that we see today in many countries in the world.  Is this much different than what is happening in Niger right now in Africa?  There, a military coup just overthrew a democratically elected government and is seeking support of the Wagner Group of mercenaries from Russia.  Chinese warlords spent a lot of money buying foreign weapons during the warlord era. They even hired foreigners to build them armories and build them weapons in their own territories.  You can look at places like Niger, Ethiopia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq or even the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and see parallels.  Can you think of cases? 

And the Chinese warlords stashed their funds overseas in foreign bank accounts and property for a rainy day.  Does any of that sound familiar today?

I suppose one bright spot in all of this is that warlord periods can end.  Looking back 100 years later in China, much has changed.  China is no longer a failed state.  Failed states are not necessarily permanent, nor are civil wars. 

But a breakdown in order, here from the end of the Qing Dynasty, and a failure of these warlords and leaders to put the nation ahead of their wallets and social status, can be a disaster for a country. One leader replaces another, and the common people just experience war, devastation, taxation and maybe banditry and hopelessness.

But that is not permanent. This too will pass.  And we will soon see how.  It might not be the way you think.

Please join us again.