Warlord Rule in China

One of the concerns of the revolutionaries or Chinese scholars who favored the republican system was how to popularize the modern ideas among the populace. This became the central concern for the intellectuals especially with the series of events starting from the secret "21 Demands" that Japan asked of China in 1915. In the same year, a journal titled New Youth (La Jeunesse, as its founders titled it in French alongside its Chinese title 新青年) was founded in Shanghai, and its goal was to propagate new Western ideas, with lively articles on politics, society, literature, and translations of Western novels/poetry. After May 4th 1919, such journals proliferated in China. The need to "enlighten" the Chinese population acquired greater urgency. What the Chinese educated tried to achieve was what is termed "civil society" in the West--where there would be a free flow of information and free communication of public opinion. What McCord argues in the reading on warlordism in Hunan Province in 1920 is that we do see the formation of public opinion on various local issues, and in particular, in the case against the retreating warlord troops that plundered and killed along the way. The background to McCord's article was a good illustration of China under warlord rule. Hunan is a province in central China, and during the 1910s and 20s, it was sandwiched between the northern and southern warlords. The military warlord governor of Hunan Province, Zhang Jingyao, was appointed by Prime Minister Duan Qirui of the Beijing government in 1918. Zhang was one of the most notorious military warlords who profiteered from the opium trade, debased the Hunan currency, and shut down opposition, alienating himself from most Hunan elites. In January 1920, a young Hunanese Mao Tse-tung, whom we will encounter later, led 1,000 students from Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, to Beijing to petition to Duan Qirui for the removal of Zhang from his governorship in Hunan. Duan ignored the petition. But later, in mid-1920, there was a civil war within the northern warlord camp, in particular between Duan Qirui and a warlord from Zhili Province, Wu Peifu. Wu had been instrumental in taking Hunan Province for the Beijing government, but the governorship went to Duan's home townsman Zhang Jingyao. Angered at the choice of Zhang, Wu held a ceasefire with the southern warlord troops and pulled his troops out of Hunan, endangering Zhang Jingyao, whose forces were quickly beaten by the southern troops, and Zhang had to surrender his governorship of Huan to Tan Yankai, a Hunan native and Nationalist Party member, although Tan himself did not last through the end of the year as governor. (Angus McDonald Jr., "Mao Tse-tung and the Hunan Self-Government Movement, 1920: An Introduction and Five Translations," in The China Quarterly 68 (Dec.1976): 751-753; Edward McCord, "Cries That Shook the Earth," current online reading). The McCord article provides a picture of warlord infighting in early republican China and the devastation it had on Chinese society. It also discusses the growth of public opinion in China, at least in some regions, and the use of modern Western ideas such as law and rights in the Hunan provincials' fight with their governor for justice to be carried out. The newspaper in question, dagongbao (L'Impartial), was one of the prestigious newspapers with nationwide circulation and had various local editions.  And the problem at hand was the plundering and killing by ousted governor Zhang's retreating forces under Liu Zhenyu and Wang Jisan in three counties. Such plundering was typical, though the killing on such a massive scale was quite unusual. The rampant acts of the soldiers showed one of the inherent problems of the warlord system, that it left the military commanders accountable to no one but themselves. The people who were involved asking for punishment of Liu and Wang ranged from local educational associations, chambers of commerce, and hundreds of victims from the three demolished counties, who finally forced governor Tan Yankai to make the unusual decision to punish Liu and Wang plus three of their cohorts who were chiefly responsible for the killings. Public unrest outweighed concern for retaliation when captured or opposition from fellow warlord followers. This spontaneous mass movement for social justice created a precedent for later events. In the 1920s, Hunan farmers organized farmers' associations, and under the leadership of the Nationalist Party who later occupied the area, Hunan tenant farmers also launched movements to address the overly high rent of their landlords, sometimes confiscating the latter's land and redistribute it among themselves. It was this spontaneous movement that inspired Mao Tse-tung, then a young Communist working in the Hunan Propaganda Bureau under the leadership of the Nationalist Party-at a time when the Nationalists and Communists formed a coalition to overtake the warlords and unify China, to think that the basis of mass support for the Communists was not the industrial working class according to classical Marxism, but the farmers. This important realization laid the foundation for the future of Chinese Communism--which ultimately thrived on a reliance on the farmers rather than urban workers, the biggest difference between Chinese and Soviet Communism.