Northern militarists
As northern militarists or Beiyang clique ( Chinese 北洋 军阀 ), the entirety of the generals ( warlords ) who emerged from the northern Chinese Beiyang army is referred to in Chinese historiography .
Since 1917 they fought against each other for power in Beijing ( Zhili-Anhui War of 1920; First Zhili-Fengtian War of 1922; Second Zhili-Fengtian War of 1924; Anti-Fengtian War of 1926), the entirety of these conflicts , Changes of alliance and overthrow is also known as general wars. In 1928, however, the northern generals were subjugated by the Guomindang advancing from the south and destroyed by the Japanese in 1931 . By 1928 they were recognized internationally as the official representatives of China, although they had never ruled the entire country.
Beiyang clique
After the Chinese defeats of 1885 and 1895, the pro-western chancellor Li Hongzhang set up a third army, the so-called teaching troops, in addition to the regular army and a mercenary army in northern China (the Beiyang fleet was also lost in 1895). They were the only ones equipped with modern weapons and trained by Western officers. With their help, the government put down the Boxer Rebellion , which promoted the rise of the then commander Yuan Shikai (army chief until 1909). Appointed army chief and premier again in the 1911 uprising, he held the north (at least the provinces of Fengtian , Zhili , Jehol , Henan and Gansu ) against the republican insurgents of the south until both Emperor Puyi in the north and interim president Sun Yat- sen (Guomindang) in the south resigned in his favor.
Yuan Shikai became President of the Republic of China . Instead of ruling from the new capital Nanking in the south, he continued to rule from Beijing . His power was based on the Beiyang army, but crumbled when he attempted a restoration of the monarchy under an empire of his own in 1915-16 , which his Beiyang generals (all but Zhang Xun ) failed to do . The southern provinces of Guangdong (Guomindang in Canton ) and Guangxi (later allied with the Guomindang) fell away.
Yuan's successor as president was General Li Yuanhong , who comes from Beijing or the province of Zhili surrounding the former capital, but controls the province of Hubei . He was briefly ousted in 1917 by the monarchist general Zhang Xun from Jiangsu Province . The new president was Zhili General Feng Guozhang in 1917-18 , and Prime Minister Marshal Duan Qirui from Anhui Province .
Zhang Xun
Li Yuanhong
Feng Guozhang
Zhili clique
Successor as leader of the Zhili faction and provincial governor was after Feng Guozhang's death in 1919 Cao Kun , who with the help of the Fengtian clique in the Zhili-Anhui war forced Premier Duan to resign in 1920. After the break with the Fengtian clique in 1922 and a second reign of Li Yuanhong until 1923, he himself became president of Beijing until 1924. In terms of foreign policy, Cao Kun received support, money and arms from Great Britain and France . The most important Zhili generals were Wu Peifu in southern China (Hubei Province) and Sun Chuanfang in eastern China (from Jiangxi to Nanjing), both of whom went their own way after 1924 and were defeated in 1926 by the troops of the Guomindang advancing from southern China.
Cao Kun
Sun Chuanfang
Wu Peifu
Anhui clique
The Anhui clique, which had dominated since 1916 with the help of Japan but had been defeated in 1920, had already allied themselves with the Guomindang and the Fengtian clique from Manchuria in 1921, but had been defeated again in 1922. In 1924, ex-prime minister Duan Qirui instead made an alliance with the renegade Zhili general Feng Yuxiang against Wu Peifu and thus became president himself in 1924-26, but with the help of the Fengtian clique he drove Feng out of Beijing again in 1925. In fact, however, he was dependent on his Fengtian allies until they switched sides again. After his final defeat against the Zhili and Fengtian cliques allied in 1926, Duan withdrew. The Anhui militarists lost their last province to Sun Chuanfang, Anhui's neighboring province of Zhejiang, and from then on played no role.
Duan Qirui
Xu Shuzheng
Jin Yunpeng
Fengtian clique
The militarists in the Manchurian province of Fengtian (today Liaoning) were also called the Mukden clique after the Manchurian capital Mukden (today Shenyang) . But they also always ruled the neighboring provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin (including what is now northeastern Inner Mongolia).
In the first Zhili-Fengtian War , Wu Peifu defeated these army units and regional militias of Marshal Zhang Zuolin († 1928), who in turn was related by marriage to General Zhang Xun († 1923). In a second Zhili-Fengtian war , however, Wu Peifu suffered a defeat in 1924 because two other Zhili generals ( Zhang Zongchang and Feng Yuxiang ) defected to Zhang Zuolin.
During the war against the Anhui clique and the Guominjun in 1926, however, fighting broke out within the Fengtian clique. Zhang Zuolin was only able to assert himself with Japanese help and formed an alliance with the rest of the Zhili militarists, which finally brought him the presidency in Beijing in 1927.
Zhang Zongchang
Zhang Zuolin
Zhang Xueliang
- Maximum expansion until 1920 and between 1924/26 and 1927/28 over the provinces of Fengtian, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Jehol, Chahar, Suiyuan, Zhili and Shandong
Guominjun
Actually, Wu Peifu, Sun Chuanfang and Zhang Zuolin had formed the alliance in 1926 primarily against the Guominjun National Army ( 國民 軍 / 国民 军 , Guómínjūn , Kuominchün ) of the Zhili-renegade Marshal Feng Yuxiang . The Fengtian general Guo Songling had defected to Feng. Feng, who is said to have adopted Christianity in 1914 and strived for Christian socialism , had initially withdrawn to the Gansu province in 1925 , but became more and more powerful and soon united 45,000 men who were trained by the Soviets by 1926. Zhang Zuolin’s two allies were defeated, and Zhang Zuolin, the new strong man in northern China, was killed in an assassination attempt that both the Guomindang and the Japanese were blamed for shortly before his planned coronation . Feng Yuxiang formed an alliance with the Guomindang nationalists of Sun Yat-sen's successor Chiang Kai-shek and (Zhang Zuolin's son) Marshal Zhang Xueliang and General Yan Xishan from Shanxi Province . Together they drove the Fengtian general Zhang Zongchang, who defected to the Japanese, from Shandong. After a failed coup by Feng (with Yan Xishan and Chiang Kai-shek's vice Wang Jingwei ) against Chiang in 1930, all three allies recognized the leadership of the new generalissimo, who from then on concentrated on the annihilation of the communists.
Feng Yuxiang
Yan Xishan
Guo Songling
- Maximum expansion between 1924/26 and 1928/30 over the provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, Chahar, Suiyuan (Inner Mongolia), Henan and Ningxia
Since then, power has been in the hands of the southern Whampoa clique , the new officer corps of the nationalist Kuomintang army that had been trained in the Whampoa Military Academy (Huangpu, near Canton) since 1924 . But as early as 1931, after the Mukden incident and the Manchurian crisis , the Japanese army occupied northeast China (Marshal Zhang Xueliang did not resist at Chiang Kai-shek's instructions) and established the puppet state of Manchukuo under Puyi in 1932 (another state called Mengjiang in the interior in 1935 Mongolia). Many of Zhang Zuolin's former officers defected to the Japanese and Manchurians , only a few generals of his son and successor fought briefly as army partisans against the Japanese ( Ma Zhanshan , Ding Chao , Wang Delin , Li Hai-Ching ). Together with the remnants of the latter and the communists, Feng Yuxiang formed the " Allied Anti-Japanese Army " in Inner Mongolia in 1933 , but from 1935 onwards it was no longer able to assert itself against the communists. When the Japanese wanted to establish a separate state ( East Hebei ) in Beijing and Shandong Province in 1935 , Zhang Xueliang and Yan Xishan instead forced Chiang Kai-shek to form an alliance with the communists of the Soviet Republic of Yan'an (Shaanxi Province) in 1936 , see Xi'an Incident . But soon there was the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and communists.
swell
- Small Encyclopedia World History Volume 2, p. 233. Leipzig 1979
- The Times - Atlas Second World War, p. 32f. Augsburg 1999
- Thomas Weyrauch: China's neglected republic. 100 years in the shadow of world history . Volume 1: 1911-1949 . Longtai, Giessen (ie) Heuchelheim 2009, ISBN 978-3-938946-14-5 .
