The Warlords
Authors: McCord Edward A. 
Published: July 2018

The appearance of warlords, who wielded significant autonomous political power on the basis of their personal control of military force, was a unique feature of early-20th-century Chinese history. These warlords smashed hopes that the 1911 Revolution would replace China’s last imperial dynasty with a strong, unified, and reform-minded republic. In the early Republic, military commanders largely gained political power amid civil wars, which were fought to determine how political power was to be organized and who would wield it. This political devolution was initially slowed by the centralizing efforts of the first president of the Republic, Yuan Shikai. But his reliance on military force also emboldened military commanders to seize direct political power in the civil wars that followed his death. The fragmented nature of Chinese military organization inherited from the Qing dynasty provided an initial basis for factional warlord alignments. Thus, Yuan Shikai’s original Beiyang Army produced a broad “Beiyang” faction of warlords who dominated North China in the early Republic. In contrast, the original provincial organization of late Qing military forces in South China encouraged provincial warlord groupings, such as the Yunnan or Guangxi factions. Such factions were inherently unstable, though, as individual warlords competed to gain control over civil administrations that provided access to the financial resources the warlords needed to support their armies, making constant warfare one of the main features of the warlord era. The high tide of warlord power lasted only from the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916 to the nominal “reunification” of the country by the Nationalist Party’s Northern Expedition in 1926–1928. The Nationalist Party’s reliance on military force to establish its power, including the direct absorption of warlord armies, actually reinforced the political power of many military commanders. These residual or party warlords continued to wield a considerable degree of political power autonomous of the central Nationalist government in Nanjing for at least another decade. Chinese warlord studies in the West largely started with the publication of two major warlord biographies that have remained classics in the field, Sheridan 1966 and Gillin 1967 (both cited under Biographies). The high point of Western warlord scholarship was the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, with the publication of a dozen major works and many significant articles. After this, Western warlord studies declined to only sporadic publication, while the focus of China’s modern military history shifted almost entirely to the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945. In contrast, there was an explosion of interest in the warlord era in China in the early 1980s that has largely continued unabated, with a steady stream of publications in both scholarly and popular formats. To the extent that there has been some difference between the West and China, Western scholars of warlordism have generally moved away from biography to more topical approaches, while biographical approaches, as well as the history of warlord factions and military campaigns, have remained central to Chinese scholarship.