WARLORD

Wade-Giles romanization tu-chn, Pinyin dujun independent military commander in China in the early and mid-20th century. Warlords ruled various parts of the country following the death of Yan Shih-k'ai (1859-1916), who had served as the first president of the Republic of China from 1912 to 1916. Yan's power had come from his position as head of the Peiyang Army, which was the only major modern military force in China at the time. His conduct of the government through a reliance upon military power rather than parliamentary methods made him the "father of the warlords"; at least 10 of the major warlords that came to power in the 1920s had originally served as officers in his Peiyang Army. The other warlords achieved power through the backing either of various provincial military interests or of foreign powers, most notably Japan but also Britain and the Soviet Union. New factions and alliances constantly ensured that no one warlord ever became powerful enough to destroy all the rest. As a result, few warlords were able to extend their power over more than one or two provinces. Nevertheless, a major cleavage developed between warlord groups in North China and those in the South. The South was the heartland of Chinese Republican spirit and nationalistic feeling. In 1921 the great nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen established an independent revolutionary regime under the control of his Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) at the South China city of Canton. This regime soon came to exercise a preeminent position among the squabbling southern warlords. In the North, conditions were quite different. There, three leading personalities emerged in the early 1920s: Chang Tso-lin, a former bandit based in Manchuria who, with Japanese support, came to control that northeastern region's three provinces; Wu P'ei-fu, a traditionally educated former Peiyang officer who tried to establish order in central China; and Feng Y-hsiang, the "Christian General" (he baptized his troops with fire hoses), who seized Peking in 1924 and destroyed the facade of parliamentary government and a unified China that had been presented by the capital. Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen received aid from the small Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union to build the Republican Army, through which the Nationalist Party consolidated its control in the South. Sun died in 1925, but the next year Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek swept northward and in 1928 reunified China, abolishing the separate warlord regimes. Chiang, however, did not really eliminate the warlords, but rather, by means of alliances, incorporated many of them into his army. Local warlords continued to exert de facto power over their own domains and to be a factor in Chinese politics until the establishment of the Communist government in 1949.