The President Who Would Be Emperor: Yuan Shikai, the Broken Republic, and the Warlords

Act I: The Deal and the Broken Parliament (Review Question 4)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 419. Reading-guide sentence (p. 419): "Yuan outlawed the Nationalist Party; in 1914 he abolished all assemblies down to the county level, trying to nip participatory democracy in the bud."

Why Yuan?

Review Question 4 asks first why 1911 did not produce a stable democratic republic. Part of the answer lies in how the revolution ended. The provinces had seceded, but the strongest army in China, the Beiyang (Northern) Army, belonged in practice to Yuan Shikai, whom the court recalled in late 1911. Ebrey stresses that the revolutionaries' "biggest fear … was foreign intervention" (p. 419). A long civil war could invite the powers to protect their loans, railways and concessions, as they had in 1900. So the leaders at Nanjing bargained: Sun Yatsen, provisional president from 1 January 1912, would step aside if Yuan secured the abdication. The edict came on 12 February; Sun resigned the next day; and on 10 March Yuan took the oath in Beijing, having refused the revolutionaries' demand that he govern from Nanjing, far from his troops (slide d).

Ebrey's portrait of Yuan is balanced. He "had strong credentials as a reformer of the old, self-strengthening type," had promoted schools, commerce and industry as governor-general of Zhili, and believed in "careful central planning of the sort Germany and Japan had shown could be effective." But "he was committed to a strong China but not a republican one" (p. 419). Students should remember slide c: in 1898 Yuan had sided with Cixi against the reformers, and his career had been built on loyalty to the throne and the loyalty of his own officers to him.¹

The elections of 1912–13 and the murder of Song Jiaoren

The provisional constitution of March 1912 deliberately weakened the presidency by creating a cabinet responsible to parliament. Elections for a two-house National Assembly were held over the winter of 1912–13. The franchise was limited to men with property or schooling, about 40 million voters, roughly a tenth of the population, but the contest was real and hundreds of parties took part. The Nationalist Party (Guomindang), formed in 1912 from the Revolutionary Alliance and smaller groups, won 269 of 596 seats in the House and 123 of 274 in the Senate: a plurality in both (slide e).

Its architect was Song Jiaoren, a thirty-year-old Hunanese who believed in cabinet government and expected to become prime minister. On the evening of 20 March 1913, waiting at the Shanghai railway station for the train to Beijing, he was shot; he died on 22 March. The gunman had been hired by a Shanghai underworld figure in contact with Yuan's premier, Zhao Bingjun. Yuan was never charged, and several conspirators died or disappeared, but, as Ebrey says, "the shocked public assumed Yuan was responsible" (p. 419).²

The Reorganisation Loan

Yuan's government was nearly bankrupt, and in April 1913 it signed the Reorganisation Loan with a consortium of British, French, German, Russian and Japanese banks; the United States had withdrawn in March. The contract was for £25 million at 5 percent over 47 years, secured on the salt revenue, which a Sino-foreign inspectorate would now help collect. Ebrey's "$100 million" (p. 419) is a round figure; at the exchange rates of 1913 the sum was closer to $120 million, and after discounts and deductions for old debts the government received much less. What made the loan a political crisis was that it was signed without the approval of the new parliament. The American minister reported that on the night of the signing the Nationalist president and vice-president of the Senate went to the bank to protest that the contract was unconstitutional and were turned away (slide f).³

The Second Revolution and the end of the assemblies

In June 1913 Yuan dismissed the Nationalist military governors of Jiangxi, Guangdong and Anhui. In July Li Liejun rose in Jiangxi and Huang Xing took command at Nanjing; in all, Ebrey notes, "seven provincial governments declared their independence" (p. 419). The rising was poorly coordinated, and Yuan's divisions, paid in part from the loan, moved quickly along the railways. Nanjing fell on 1 September, and Sun, Huang and their colleagues fled to Japan (slide g).

Yuan then dismantled the republic's institutions in a few months (slide h). In October 1913 parliament elected him president for a five-year term, under pressure from crowds of his supporters around the building. In November he outlawed the Nationalist Party and expelled its members, leaving parliament without a quorum; in January 1914 he dissolved it, and in February he dissolved the provincial assemblies, the very bodies that had organized the secession of 1911. A "constitutional compact" of May 1914 concentrated power in the presidency, and an election law of December 1914 gave the president a ten-year, renewable term and the right to nominate his successor. By then, as Ebrey writes, he had "abolished all assemblies down to the county level" (p. 419).

Act II: The President Who Would Be Emperor (Review Question 4)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 419, 425.

Autocracy and its achievements

The concept on slide i is autocracy: rule by one person whose power is not effectively limited by any elected body, party, court or law. Yuan kept the title of president and ruled under a constitution, but it was one he had written. Historians have been less dismissive of him than the old Nationalist histories were. Young argues that Yuan's program was a coherent attempt at centralizing, bureaucratic modernization, and Ebrey lists its achievements: "extending elementary education, suppressing opium cultivation, and promoting judicial reform" (p. 419). Yuan also re-established central control over provincial finances and appointments to a degree no government would match for another two decades. The question he raised, whether a strong state can be built without political participation, would return many times in modern Chinese history.

The Twenty-One Demands

In August 1914 Japan entered the First World War as Britain's ally and in November took the German leasehold at Qingdao in Shandong. On 18 January 1915 the Japanese minister, Hioki Eki, presented Yuan with twenty-one demands in five groups (slide j). Most, as Ebrey says, "entailed economic privileges" in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Shandong and the Yangzi valley; Group 5 "would have made China, in effect, a protectorate of Japan" by placing Japanese advisers in the government and police (p. 425). Yuan's government leaked the demands, and boycotts and protests spread. Japan withdrew Group 5 and on 7 May 1915 delivered an ultimatum; Yuan accepted on 9 May, and treaties were signed on 25 May. Ebrey writes that he accepted on "May 7"; the American records show the ultimatum on the 7th and the acceptance on the 9th, and both days were later observed as National Humiliation Day.⁴ Yuan's surrender, however unavoidable militarily, cost him the patriotic credit he would need for his last gamble.

The rites and the throne

From 1913 conservative scholars around Kang Youwei's Confucian Society campaigned to make Confucianism the state religion; Ebrey writes that Yuan "announced that Confucianism would be made the state religion" (p. 419). More precisely, Yuan restored the official sacrifices to Confucius in 1914 and, on 23 December 1914, performed the winter-solstice sacrifice at the Temple of Heaven, a rite reserved for the Son of Heaven (slide k and the title photograph). The symbolism was unmistakable.

In August 1915 a Peace Planning Society began a public campaign for monarchy, and Yuan's American constitutional adviser, Frank J. Goodnow of Columbia, wrote a memorandum suggesting that a monarchy might suit China better than a republic. Ebrey dates Yuan's announcement to "August 1915" (p. 419), but that was when the campaign began. In the autumn a "national convention" of delegates chosen under official supervision voted 1,993 to none for monarchy, and on 12 December 1915 Yuan accepted the throne, choosing the reign title Hongxian, "Grand Constitution," to begin on 1 January 1916 (slide b).

The collapse of 1916

On 25 December 1915 Yunnan declared independence under Cai E and Tang Jiyao, whose National Protection Army claimed to defend the republic; Guizhou and Guangxi followed, and then other southern provinces (slide l). Decisively, Yuan's own senior generals, Duan Qirui and Feng Guozhang among them, would not fight for the empire, and Japan and the European powers advised him to abandon it. On 22 March 1916 Yuan cancelled the monarchy. He died of kidney failure on 6 June 1916, aged fifty-six. "The educated and politically aware elite were outraged," Ebrey writes, "their protests dying down only after Yuan died" (p. 419).

A good answer to Review Question 4 therefore has two halves. The republic failed because its founders surrendered power to the man with the army, because the parliamentary leaders had no force of their own, and because foreign money and foreign pressure strengthened Yuan against parliament. Yuan consolidated his rule by murder, foreign loans, military victory, the abolition of parties and assemblies, a self-written constitution, and the borrowed rituals of monarchy.

Act III: The Warlords (Review Question 5)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 419–420. Reading-guide sentence (p. 420): "Warlords, not surprisingly, did little to maintain infrastructure or advance modernization."

From regional armies to warlords

The warlords were the end point of a shift that began with the Taiping war, when the Qing allowed men such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang to raise armies bound to them by personal loyalty (slide n; Chapter 18, Lecture 2). Yuan's Beiyang Army descended from Li's Huai Army, and its officers owed their careers to Yuan. "Without a central strongman," Ebrey writes, "commanders in Yuan's old army, governors of provinces, and even gangsters built their own power bases" (p. 419). The concept on slide o defines a warlord as a commander who controls territory through an army loyal to him personally, collects its revenue, and acts independently of any central government.

Historians stress how varied they were. Zhang Zuolin, a former leader of irregulars, built a well-run regime in Manchuria in close and uneasy partnership with Japan. Wu Peifu, who had passed the lowest civil examination before joining the army, cultivated an image as a patriotic Confucian soldier and appeared on the cover of Time in 1924. Feng Yuxiang, the "Christian general," drilled his troops in hymns as well as tactics. Hsi-sheng Ch'i's study of warlord politics treats them as players in a balance-of-power system, while James Sheridan emphasizes the social cost of their rule.⁵

Beijing's revolving governments

The Beijing government survived as a prize. It held the diplomatic recognition of the powers and, with it, access to the customs surplus and foreign loans. "A government of sorts was maintained in Beijing under the domination of whichever warlord held the region," with "six different presidents and twenty-five successive cabinets" (p. 420; slide p). Duan Qirui dominated it first, financed by large Japanese loans in 1917–18. In July 1917 the general Zhang Xun restored Puyi to the throne for twelve days. The northern generals then formed rival cliques: Duan's Anhui clique lost to the Zhili clique of Cao Kun and Wu Peifu in 1920; Wu defeated Zhang Zuolin's Fengtian army in 1922 and was defeated in turn in 1924, when Feng Yuxiang changed sides. In 1923 Cao Kun had himself elected president by paying members of parliament, reportedly about 5,000 silver dollars a vote.

Soldiers and villagers

Armies grew from roughly half a million men in 1916 to well over a million by the mid-1920s, far beyond what any regime could pay. "The armies lived off the land, looting wherever they moved" (p. 420). Ebrey quotes a warlord officer, cited by Sheridan: "My men would surround a village before dawn and fire several shots to intimidate the people.… This was the classic way of raiding a village.… We took corn, rice, potatoes, taro" (p. 420; slide q). The tone of the passage is the point: raiding was routine. Other accounts tell of villagers beaten or killed when they resisted and of men seized as porters. The deck keeps this restrained, but students should not mistake restraint for mildness.

Taxes, guns and opium

"Because they also needed money to buy weapons, warlords instituted all sorts of new taxes" (p. 420; slide r): surcharges on the land tax, transit taxes on goods, forced loans from merchants, and, in Sichuan, where rival commanders divided the province, the collection of land taxes for future years, in some districts many years ahead.⁶ "Foreign countries were more than willing to sell modern arms to the warlords, often backing their own favorite contender"; an arms embargo agreed among the powers in 1919 was widely evaded. Most strikingly, opium, which the late Qing campaign begun in 1906 and Yuan's government had nearly eradicated in many places, returned when warlords "forced peasants to grow it as a revenue source" (p. 420).

Infrastructure and disaster

Railways were the warlords' main strategic asset, so they commandeered rolling stock, halted civilian traffic, and wrecked track and bridges in their campaigns. River conservancy, which required steady funding and coordination across provinces, decayed, and Ebrey notes that neglect of the Yellow River dikes led "to some catastrophic floods" (p. 420; slide s). The North China famine of 1920–21, caused by drought, killed about half a million people; Lillian Li shows that disrupted transport and the weakness of government made relief depend heavily on Chinese and international charities.⁷

The frontiers

The outer territories had been bound to the Qing emperor, not to a Chinese nation, and their leaders treated the fall of the dynasty as the end of the tie (slide t). Outer Mongolia declared independence in December 1911 under the Bogd Khan, with Russian support; after a brief Chinese reoccupation in 1919–21 it became, in 1924, the Soviet-aligned Mongolian People's Republic. In Tibet the Chinese garrison was expelled in 1912, and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, returning from exile in British India, proclaimed independence in 1913. Britain preferred an autonomous Tibet under nominal Chinese "suzerainty," and Ebrey summarizes the outcome as Tibet "under British sway and Mongolia under Russian" (p. 419).⁸ In Manchuria, Japan's Kwantung Army and South Manchuria Railway zone grew in weight, and Zhang Zuolin's regime depended on Japanese goodwill, a dependence that ended with his assassination by Kwantung Army officers in 1928.

Pierian Spring: The Wartime Boom and the New Classes (Review Question 8)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 421–422, 424. Reading-guide sentence (p. 422): "World War I gave China's businesses and industries a chance to flourish."

Before the war

Modern industry began under official patronage. Li Hongzhang's China Merchants Steam Navigation Company (1872) and its successors were run on the formula of "official supervision and merchant management," and Ebrey calls them "government-supervised and -supported ventures, not true capitalist ones" (p. 422; slide x). The Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) gave Japanese subjects the right to manufacture in the treaty ports, and the most-favored-nation clauses extended it to the other powers, which "leaped at the chance" because Chinese labor was cheap (slide y). By 1914 a recognizable bourgeoisie had formed: merchants, bankers, industrialists, compradors and overseas Chinese traders. Chambers of commerce, authorized by the Qing in 1904, gave it organization and a public voice (slide aa).

The boom

The First World War cut European exports to China and raised demand for Chinese goods. Ebrey's figures carry the argument (slide z): Chinese textile mills rose from 22 in 1911 to 109 in 1921, coal output from 13 to 20 million tons between 1913 and 1919, and modern banks from 7 to 131 between 1912 and 1923; electric and telephone companies spread to county seats and market towns (pp. 422, 424). The word "inadvertently" in Review Question 8 matters: no Chinese government planned this boom, and much of it took place while Beijing was a warlord prize. Marie-Claire Bergère calls the period from 1911 to 1937, and above all the years up to 1927, the "golden age" of the Chinese bourgeoisie, when weak government left businessmen unusually free and, after 1915, chambers of commerce often ran city services such as sanitation, schools and police.⁹

New fortunes and new elites

The Rong brothers of Wuxi, Rong Zongjing and Rong Desheng, are Ebrey's example (p. 424; slide cc). Starting from a small Shanghai native bank, they opened a flour mill in 1901 and another in 1913, then built eight factories between 1914 and 1920 and moved into cotton spinning with the first Shenxin mill in 1915. Sherman Cochran shows how such firms used family and native-place networks to compete with Japanese and Western rivals.¹⁰ The Commercial Press pay scale (p. 422; slide bb) shows a different kind of new elite: an editor with a Chinese college degree started at 80 yuan a month, a Western graduate at 200, and a graduate of Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Cambridge at 250. Status now came from modern, often foreign, education.

The workers

Ebrey is plain about the cost: "twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks, and widespread child labor, especially in textile mills," with labor contractors who "kept laborers in conditions of debt slavery" (p. 424; slide dd). Emily Honig's study of Shanghai's cotton mills, based partly on interviews with former mill women, describes the contract system in which a contractor paid a poor rural family for a girl's labor for several years, housed and fed her minimally, and kept most of her wages.¹¹ That many mills were foreign-owned, increasingly by Japanese firms, "added to management-labor friction," which would erupt in the strikes of the 1920s (Lecture 4).

The Great World

Ebrey's Material Culture feature on the Great World (p. 421; slide ee) shows the leisure side of the boom. Opened in 1917 by Huang Chujiu, who had made his fortune in patent medicines, it was a six-story amusement center with gaming tables, opera troupes, acrobats, barbers and earwax extractors, acupuncturists, storytellers and peep shows, a temple, and on top, tightrope walkers, mahjong and marriage brokers. Its European façade and Chinese interior are a fair emblem of the new urban culture.

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. Ernest P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k'ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), is still the standard account and the source for most of the detail in Acts I and II. On Yuan's earlier career, Stephen R. MacKinnon, Power and Politics in Late Imperial China: Yuan Shi-kai in Beijing and Tianjin, 1901–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). ↩

2. On the election figures and the assassination, Young, Presidency. The seat totals are those generally cited from the official returns; small parties and independents make exact counts vary slightly. ↩

3. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1913, doc. 197 (the American minister's report of 6 May 1913), at the Office of the Historian, history.state.gov. The Chinese text of the contract, dated 26 April 1913, gives the sum as 25 million pounds sterling. ↩

4. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, doc. 154. On the demands and their reception, see also Young, Presidency, and, for the boycott, Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003). ↩

5. James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912–1949 (New York: Free Press, 1975); Hsi-sheng Ch'i, Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); Edward A. McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). ↩

6. On Sichuan's advance collections, see Robert A. Kapp, Szechwan and the Chinese Republic: Provincial Militarism and Central Power, 1911–1938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). Contemporary claims of taxes collected "decades" in advance should be read as reports of the worst districts, not provincial averages. ↩

7. Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s–1990s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). The Shenbao famine map on slide s dates from March 1921. ↩

8. Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). ↩

9. Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Bergère also shows how quickly the boom faded after European competition returned in the early 1920s. ↩

10. Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ↩

11. Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). The photograph on slide dd comes from Leo Duran, Raw Silk: A Practical Hand-Book for the Buyer (New York, 1921), plate "A China Steam Filature." ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Ernest P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k'ai (1977). The standard study; takes Yuan's centralizing program seriously.

James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration (1975). A readable survey of the republican era, strong on the warlords and their social cost.

Edward A. McCord, The Power of the Gun (1993). How the military politics of 1911–1916 produced warlordism.

Hsi-sheng Ch'i, Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928 (1976). The warlord system as a contest of cliques.

Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937 (1989). The classic account of the wartime boom and the business class.

Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers (1986). Women workers in the Shanghai cotton mills.

Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China (2007). Famine, water control and the state across three centuries.