China's Warlords PDF
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CHINA'S WARLORDS China's Warlords David Bonavia HONG KONG OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD NEW YORK 1995 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press First published 199S Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York © Oxford University Press 1995 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press (China) Ltd. Within Hong Kong, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Ordinance currently in force. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to Oxford University Press (China) Ltd at the address below This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bonavia, David, 1940- China's warlords/David Bonavia. p. cm.—(Oxford in Asia paperbacks) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-586179-5 1. China—History—Warlord period, 1916-1928. 2. China—Politics and government—1912-1949. 3. Generals—China. I. Title. II. Series. DS777.36B66 1995 951.04'1—dc20 95-3206 C1P Printed in Hong Kong Published by Oxford University Press (China) Ltd 18/F Warwick House, Taikoo Place, 979 King's Road, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong Editor's Note David Bonavia, my husband, completed this book in the early 1980s. The book remained unpublished at the time of his untimely death in September 1988, at the age of 48. In 1992, our friend and renowned scholar of the Republican warlord period, Dr Diana Lary of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, visited Hong Kong and asked to read the manuscript. Encouraged by her enthu siasm, by the new contribution she thought it made to the understanding of this confusing and complex period of China's twentieth-century history, and by its relevance to the current situation with regard to regionalism as a political characteristic, once again strongly evident in China, I approached Oxford University Press. I sincerely thank Dr Lary for her encouragement and sup port. She has brought her own academic intensity to bear on aspects of the editing. Where elaboration appeared desirable, this has been included in square brackets. To bring the text in line with current practice in the field, names of places and people figuring in the text have been put into the pinyin system of romanization. The few excep tions include the cities, Peking, Canton, Tientsin, Nanking and Yenan, the Yangtze river, and the political party, Kuomintang. The book, otherwise, is entirely David's work — his final contribution to Chinese studies. Judy Bonavia Hong Kong October 1993 Foreword This book was written in the early 1980s, and was unfin ished at the time of David Bonavia's death. It was written at a time when Chinese warlords had slipped into scholarly oblivion. In China the study of warlords had been taboo in the 1950s and early 1960s, since all that could be said about them at times of Marxist orthodoxy was that they were 'feu dal relics' and 'running dogs of imperialism'. During the Cultural Revolution, no academic work was done at all. In the West there was a spurt of research and writing on war lords in the 1960s and 1970s; after that the subject seemed to die, perhaps exhausted by the amount of work done in a fairly short period (see Bibliography). Over the past few years interest in warlordism has re- emerged. In China a surge of activity has seen the start of new research, and the republication of memoirs and biogra phies of warlords written in the 1930s and 1940s. This work is part of a complete re-evaluation of the Republican period. In the gloomy context of modem Chinese history as now revealed, which includes the horrors of the Japanese occupa tion, the Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution, the war lords look less horrible than they did at the time. Some war lords have emerged as something close to national heroes. Feng Yuxiang has had a big revival, largely because of his rep utation for honesty and directness, and was referred to recently in the People's Daily as a 'patriotic general'.1 Zhang Xueliang's recent release from prison in Taiwan, after more then fifty years of incarceration, has revived interest in him and his father Zhang Zuolin. The recent revival and growth of regional loyalties in China as the retreat from ideology 1 1 Rertmin ribao, 21 February 1993, p. 5. viii FOREWORD gains strength has led many regions to focus on their local heroes — often warlords. Yan Xishan has re-entered the hall of heroes in Shanxi; Lu Rongting, Li Zongren, and Bai Chongxi are all revered in Guangxi; Long Yun is the darling of Yunnan. Only the truly awful warlords have been denied local hero status — for example, Zhang Zongchang in Shandong. There is another, sad reason for the revival of interest in Chinese warlordism: the sudden and evil flowering of war- lordism in other countries. The warring factions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia may be based on religious and ethnic tensions, but the flourishing of warlordism is also dependent on the breakdown of once unitary political and military structures, the free flow of arms and the willing recruitment of young men — the phenomena which once contributed to warlordism in China. What was once seen as a strange and exotic phenomenon is now something the world watches on television every night. The study of war lords now has a contemporary relevance. No book on warlordism is easy to read; there is such an overload of events that there is a constant confusion of dates and activities, of cities being captured, lost, and recaptured, and individual warlords rising, falling, and rising again. The confusions can make one's head spin, but this should not detract from the anguish and fear involved for those caught up in warlord wars. The insecurity and suffering of the Chinese people in the 1920s and 1930s were not as public as those of the Somalis and Bosnians today, but they were real, and have left their influence on contemporary China. They may pale by contrast with the Japanese invasion or the Cultural Revolution, but the divisiveness they engendered paved the way for those tragedies. Diana Lary Vancouver September 1993 Preface The warlord period — from 1912 until roughly the begin ning of the Second World War — is one of the most extra ordinary and colourful in the whole of Chinese history. It is also highly complex, and a full historical treatment would require many volumes. So most English-language studies of the period until now have focused either on individual war lords, or on the history of the provinces they ruled, or on warlords as a socio-political phenomenon. The purpose of this book is to describe the careers and characters of a num ber of warlords in a readable form, and to attempt to locate them in history as regards their politics, methods, military prowess, life-style, ethics, and ideals. Frequent reference has been made to the economic and social conditions which accompanied warlordism in China, but this is primarily a book about a group of historical figures rather than an essay in social history. I hope it will be of interest to some sinolo gists as well as general readers and students of the period, for whom a handy outline is badly needed. A complex task is the attribution of ranks to the warlords. The rank of marshal (yuanshuai) and that of general (jiang- jun) are particularly difficult to allocate, since the more pow erful warlords conveyed titles on themselves, and the gov ernment in Peking pasted them on political favourites, at moments in time often hard to ascertain. I have pursued the system of calling a warlord 'general' if he controlled only one province, and 'marshal' if he controlled two or more. This may seem somewhat arbitrary, but it does convey a rough conception of the subjects' respective strength and power, which mattered much more than ranks. I am grateful for all the hard work my wife Judy has put into the research and production of this book, and to X PREFACE Professor Jerome Ch'en for helpful suggestions and correc tions regarding the chapter on Zhang Zuolin. David Bonavia
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