Successors to the Western Front, Pt. 2: The Second Zhili-Fengtian War
The period from 1920 to 1928 was the height of the Warlord Era, in which China was wracked by civil conflicts between rival military factions. Some vied for control of the central government, while others sought to retain their autonomy in more far-flung provinces. It was only the Northern Expedition, which swept across the entire country and brought China under the Kuomintang’s unitary control, that the period finally ended.
From a military perspective, the civil war of 1924—called the Second Zhili-Fengtian War—was among the most interesting of the period. Although it lasted just two months, it mobilized several hundreds of thousands of men equipped with modern weaponry in two theaters separated by a thousand kilometers. Ultimately, the military outcome in both was decided more by betrayals by key figures than any battlefield developments, but the fighting gives us an interesting perspective on operational maneuver in post-World War I conflicts.
Beginnings of the Warlord Era
The Republic of China, founded on 1 January 1912, rested on two pillars: the ideological mobilization of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-Sen’s Nationalist movement, allied to the hard power of the military. Following the outbreak of revolution in 1911, Sun had managed to win over to his cause General Yuan Shikai, the most important military figure in contemporary China. Yuan was the commander-in-chief of the Beiyang Army, a modernized force established in the wake of several defeats at the hand of Western powers and the Japanese, intended to make good the humiliations of the Qing dynasty.
Instead it proved their downfall. The Beiyang leadership’s defection to the Nationalist cause persuaded Emperor Puyi to abdicate, and Yuan was rewarded for his services with the presidency of the new republic. Feeling his strength, he rapidly consolidated power in his own hands and surrounded himself with a coterie of loyal generals—this became known as the Beiyang government. In December 1915 he went so far as to declare the restoration of the Empire with himself as its head, but this proved wildly unpopular and he was persuaded to step down three months later. Three months after that, he died.
Yuan Shikai’s successors to the Beiyang government fought for dominance over the next twelve years, giving the Warlord Era its name. In the immediate aftermath, political power fell to Yuan’s ally Duan Qirui, who became Premier, and to Feng Guozhang, the Vice-President. Their rivalry soon splintered the Beiyang government, as factions formed around them, named after their home provinces: Duan’s was known as the Anhui clique, Feng’s as the Zhili clique. The two nevertheless managed to cooperate, with Anhui the senior partner, although this was marred by mutual distrust.
Anhui politicians swept the 1918 National Assembly elections, winning a three-quarters majority. Yet this unity did not encompass the entire country. The Nationalists had already split with the Beiyang leaders and set up their own government in the south at Guangzhou. Outer regions also maintained de facto independence, waging small-scale conflicts amongst themselves that displayed the worst abuses evoked by the term “warlordism”. Then in 1920, open war broke out within the governing coalition itself.
Feng had died the previous year, and his successor Cao Kun was bitter about being shut out of power by the Anhui. He gathered Zhili forces southwest of Beijing and formed an alliance with the military government of Manchuria—called the Fengtian clique—to attack Beijing from the opposite direction. The so-called Zhili-Anhui War lasted barely a week before Duan Qirui fled and the allies entered the capital. Although this was a military conquest, they maintained the fiction of constitutional legitimacy: they forced several high-ranking Anhui politicians to resign and held new elections the following year.
Power-sharing remained difficult, and the concord soon broke down. The two erstwhile allies went to war in April 1922, and was confined to the line running from Beijing to the port city Tianjin, just over 100 km to the southeast. The Fengtian were defeated within a week and retreated beyond Shanhaiguan, the coastal pass that marked the boundary of Manchuria. A few weeks later, a ceasefire was brokered.
The Zhili clique continued to obey the form, if not the spirit, of the republican constitution: in 1923, Cao Kun secured the presidency with prodigious bribes to assembly members. Although this further undermined the government’s legitimacy, it formalized his unofficial power, which rested on his military strength. Cao in turn relied on one man above all for that strength: Wu Peifu, the Jade Marshal. Wu had engineered the Zhili victories over the Anhui and Fengtian, winning him consideration as China’s best general. With the reins of the northern government firmly in the hands of this duo, the Zhili could bring about stability and gradually bring outlying provinces under their rule.
Renewed Tensions
Yet to speak even of the Zhili clique as a unitary actor is to overstate its centralization. The problems facing the administration in Beijing was the same as in any period of breakdown in the legitimacy of central authority: nominally loyal lieutenants held a great degree of latitude, making it difficult to conduct a coherent nationwide policy. Over summer 1924, the Zhili-aligned governor of Jiangsu Province, Qi Xieyuan, began asserting his claims to Shanghai. By legal rights, Jiangsu encompassed all the southern bank of the Yangtze between Nanjing and the sea, including Shanghai itself, but the city had come under the control of Zhejiang Province, which was governed by the remnants of the Anhui clique. Qi proposed to resolve the situation by force.
This was not in itself a problem to the Beiyang government—if anything, the absorption of China’s largest commercial city would only strengthen them. But it did risk the outbreak of a new war. Zhang Zuolin, leader of the Fengtian, had been receiving extensive support from the Japanese and was eager to avenge their loss of power, and this would give him the opportunity. A war for Shanghai could easily turn into a war for all of China.
In terms of manpower, the Zhili were the largest faction in China by far—they expected to be able to mobilize some 200,000 soldiers during the war—yet the Fengtian remained a threat. Manchuria was heavily industrialized, and their arsenal at Mukden produced about 200 artillery pieces, nearly 500,000 shells, and over 100 million rounds of rifle ammunition per year, as well as mortars, anti-tank weapons, and a variety of smaller artillery (the less efficient Zhili factories, by contrast, produced less than half that). Both sides also received help from outside powers: the Fengtian from the Japanese and most European countries, the Zhili from the Italians.
Then there was the matter of finances. The Beijing government’s claim to rule all of China also left it responsible for all outstanding debt, including that incurred by their deposed predecessors. They had trouble keeping up with interest payments as it was, and later on Wu Peifu would struggle to raise a loan to pay for an estimated 14 days of fighting. The Fengtian, by contrast, were responsible only for themselves: Manchuria’s industrial wealth and Japanese financing allowed them to set aside enough funds for roughly six months of mobilization (this is not to mention the financial resources the possessors of Shanghai could contribute).
In short, time would not be on Zhili’s side in a war lasting more than a few months. Although they possessed the greatest standing force, their strategic situation somewhat resembled Germany’s just ten years earlier: stuck between two dangerous neighbors, they needed a quick victory on one front in order to reconcentrate their forces on the other. Farther south, in Guangzhou, the KMT made rumblings about joining a war against Beijing—not too different from the threat that Italy’s entry into World War I posed to Germany. Nor was the conquest of Shanghai guaranteed to be a simple matter. Qi had twice invaded Zhejiang on his own initiative the previous summer, but failed in both attempts. If he should get bogged down in yet another, it would tie down a substantial part of Zhili’s strength.
The Curtain Opens: The Shanghai Theater
Nevertheless, Wu Peifu was convinced that Qi Xieyuan could win, and that such a victory would greatly bolster the Zhili cause. He agreed to lend the Jiangsu governor several divisions in support, and by late August over 100,000 soldiers had concentrated in and around Nanjing. The Anhui had about three-quarters this number around Shanghai. The two armies massed along the Nanjing-Shanghai rail line, facing off across the border of Zhejiang control about 50 km west of Shanghai itself.
The heavily-cultivated countryside around it was cut through with canals, irrigation ditches, and embankments, making off-track mobility difficult. Zhejiang forces exploited this by creating a defense-in-depth, positioning troops and ammunition at stations and waterways along the line. Far to the south, the Anhui also had two divisions of local troops guarding the mountainous border with Zhili-controlled Fujian Province. The difficult terrain, and the rail line running northeast to Shanghai, heavily favored the defenders.
From a military perspective, therefore, Shanghai’s defenses looked solid enough to hold out in the short term. The great question was whether the troops would stand and fight. The quality of professional soldiers in the Warlord Era was very uneven, and Anhui forces were particularly demoralized; the constant changes of fortune moreover made troops reluctant to unduly risk their lives in unending factional strife.
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