For twelve years, China's government was whoever controlled the strongest army
When Yuan Shikai died in 1916, the young Republic of China splintered. For the next twelve years rival generals from the Beiyang Army and regional strongmen fought over provinces and the capital, bribing each other's officers with what were nicknamed silver bullets. The roots of this chaos lay in a rebellion sixty years earlier.
During the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864, the Qing dynasty let provincial governors raise their own armies to fight the rebels. Many were never disbanded. Their soldiers were picked by their commanders and officers were never rotated, so loyalty ran to a general rather than the throne. The late Qing reforms mobilised regional forces instead of building a national army, and the strongest of them was Yuan Shikai's northern Beiyang Army, the best trained and armed.
Yuan used that power to push the last emperor off the throne after the 1911 revolution and then to rule as a strongman. He suspended parliament in early 1914, and in December 1915 announced he would found a new dynasty with himself as emperor. The south rose again, many of his own generals deserted him, and his death opened the field. Three northern factions dominated: the Zhili clique under Feng Guozhang, the Anhui clique of Duan Qirui and the Fengtian clique of Zhang Zuolin in Manchuria. Southern provinces had their own rival cliques, and Sun Yat-sen's 1917 attempt to lead them from Guangzhou collapsed within a year.
The word for warlord, junfa, was borrowed from Japanese by the writer Chen Duxiu during the New Culture Movement and became a left-wing insult in the 1920s; the generals had called themselves provincial military governors. The political scientist Lucian Pye described them as suspicious, hard-headed and fixed on the short term. They demanded personal loyalty yet were routinely betrayed, and promotions depended on family ties, old school bonds and sworn brotherhoods more than skill.
The era officially ended in 1928, but the strongmen did not vanish. In the Central Plains War of 1929 to 1930, former warlords including Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan rebelled against Chiang Kai-shek, and regional bosses troubled the Nanjing government through the war with Japan.
Source: Warlord Era
