116 China in World History
President Yuan was a heavy-set, jovial man who charmed his dinner
guests with his witty comments, but he was very traditional in his out-
look (having for himself a dozen concubines) and quite ruthless toward
his political opponents. The Nationalist Party responded to the assas-
sination of Song Jiaoren with calls for Yuan’s resignation and soon rose
in open revolt. As the man who had overseen the military moderniza-
tion program at the end of the Qing dynasty, Yuan enjoyed the loyalty
of most military commanders in the nation. In 1913, he made short
work of the Nationalist Party uprising, crushing their armed forces very
quickly and sending Sun Yat-sen fl eeing once again into exile in Japan.
Yuan took all the power he could for himself and borrowed huge
quantities of money from foreign banks and governments to buy weap-
ons for his armies. He wanted a strong, modern industrialized state, but
he could not quite imagine any effective political system other than the
monarchy he had known as a Qing offi cial. In 1915, he plotted with his
advisors to restore the monarchy with himself as emperor. But too much
had changed since 1911, and almost no one outside Yuan’s personal
circle supported such a move. Yuan died of kidney failure in 1916, leav-
ing a power vacuum at the center, with no national consensus about
how political power should be created and exercised.
The period from Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916 until 1927 was one
of the darkest and most violent in China’s long history. Yuan’s former
generals could not unite in support of one leader but began to compete
with each other and use their troops as personal armies loyal only to
themselves. The period is thus known as China’s Warlord Era, when the
country was splintered into dozens of small warlord kingdoms. Who-
ever controlled Beijing was recognized as the “president of the repub-
lic,” but the republic was really a fi ction as warlords large and small
competed by raiding, looting, or taxing to death the areas under their
control. The number of armed soldiers in China grew from 500,000 in
1913 to 2.2 million in 1928. Much of the wealth created during that
time was absorbed in the training and equipping of these forces.
Some warlords were little more than bandits, while others actually
tried to build a viable government in the area under their control. One
of the “best” was Feng Yuxiang, who rose from a humble peasant back-
ground to become one of the most powerful military commanders in the
country. Widely known as the Christian General, he indoctrinated his
troops in Christian teachings as well as good military discipline, built
orphanages and schools, and occasionally held mass baptisms for his
troops, using a fi re hose for sprinkling water on the converts. Zhang
Zuolin was a former bandit from Manchuria, which he ruled with an