Table Of ContentCHINA'S WARLORDS
China's Warlords
David Bonavia
HONG KONG
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD NEW YORK
1995
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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 The book remained unpublished at the time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
