Warlord Era

The Qing finally fell following the 1911 Revolution, after 266 years in power, bringing down the curtain on over two millennia of dynastic government — the most enduring political system in world history. It was replaced by the republican government of Sun Yat-sen, but, far from ushering in a new and more hopeful era, Sun’s regime proved the prelude to a further Balkanization of China, in which limited sovereignty gave way to something much worse: a chronic multiple and divided sovereignty. Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang (or Nationalist) Party was in a very weak situation, with no troops at its command or effective state apparatus at its disposal. He sought to strike a deal with the country’s most powerful military overlord, Yuan Shih-kai, but the result was to render Yuan the real power in the land and to sideline Sun. After Yuan’s death in 1916, the military governors that he had installed in the provinces quarrelled and shared out China between them, with the support of various foreign powers. The years 1916-28 were the period of warlordism ...»