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Revolution and Civil War, episode 1

The General's Coffin

On 28 June 1916 the coffin of Yuan Shikai, the general who eased the last emperor off the throne, made himself the republic's president and then tried to make himself emperor, is carried out of Beijing, and the American minister Paul Reinsch, the episode's main outside witness, watches the procession. The episode steps back to tell who Yuan was, how Japan's Twenty-One Demands and his own reach for a throne turned the provinces against him, and why his death left a republic with a president, a parliament and a premier, Duan Qirui, but no one the generals had to obey, and it asks whether what followed was only chaos. It leans heavily on foreign observers, with the Beijing government heard in its own diplomatic papers, Japan in its own demands, and Chinese voices in contemporary Chinese accounts.

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Beijing Yunnan
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

[previously] If you were with us last season, you left Beijing in the first week of June 1916, with the man who would be emperor dead of uremia and his throne standing empty. You left the first of General Zhang Xun's troops already in the capital, in a city where, by the end of May, there was no government left at all. Those soldiers still wore the queue, the long braid of the fallen Qing dynasty. And if this is where you are starting, welcome. You need to know nothing coming in. Everything this season needs, I will tell you as we go. We pick up three weeks after that death, on the day the dead man left Beijing for the last time.

Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai. Photo by Rio V. De Sieux, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the twenty eighth of June 1916, a funeral procession wound out of the old Imperial City of Beijing toward the railway station. At its head rode twenty heralds. Behind them marched three large detachments of infantry, carrying their rifles reversed, with a band between each one, and then Chinese musicians playing weirdly plaintive strains on their flutes. Then came a squadron of riders in old Chinese costume, carrying huge banners, long triangular pennants and streamers of many colours that floated in the air. Lancers escorted an empty state carriage. Buddhist monks beat drums and cymbals. Long lines of bearers carried sacrificial vessels ahead of a sedan chair, and in the chair sat the dead man's soul tablet. A soul tablet is a small wooden plaque inscribed with a dead person's name, which a family keeps and honours as the seat of the spirit. High officials walked on foot behind it, some in military uniform, some in frock coats and top hats, which looked a little out of keeping. And then the catafalque itself, the great bier on which the body lay, borne on a lattice of poles by a hundred men and covered in crimson silk embroidered with gold. Its imperial splendour only sharpened the tragedy of the day. The man inside, the American minister thought, had died as a consequence of his own ambition. A throng of mourners dressed in white went before the bier, and the dead man's sons walked under a white canopy. Among the foreigners walking in the procession was the American minister, Paul Samuel Reinsch. He was a professor of politics from the University of Wisconsin whom President Woodrow Wilson had sent to Beijing in 1913. He wanted badly to see China's young republic succeed, and he watched Japan's ambitions in China with growing alarm. He alone among the diplomats wore ordinary civilian dress that day, and he was struck by how the Chinese had blended the old imperial pageantry with brass bands and modern uniforms without a jarring note. Two days earlier he had stood in the great hall of the presidential palace, where he had so often been received by the man who now lay there on a high catafalque. Lama priests from the temples of Beijing and Mongolia chanted a litany, their deep voices rolling as if they came out of an underground cavern. Laid out on tables were the dead man's things: the gorgeous coats of the old imperial court, among them the famous Yellow Jacket, generals' uniforms of the new republic, decorations from every country that gave them, tall riding boots and soft Chinese slippers, long pipes and foreign smoking sets, swords and pistols. The Yellow Jacket was an honour the emperors of the Qing dynasty gave to their most trusted servants. The dead man had served those emperors, and then helped to end their dynasty. Then the sons came out of an inner room in their white mourning clothes, took their places before the bier, prostrated themselves, struck their foreheads heavily against the floor and wailed aloud. One of the sons, as chief mourner, offered the sacrifice, while the women of the household peered through the windows of the rooms that opened onto the hall. And then the new president of the republic stepped up and offered sacrifice at the bier of the man he had succeeded. Now, on the twenty eighth, the bier moved through the streets, and the people of Beijing lined the route behind lines of troops. They watched in respectful silence. "There was no sign of grief, rather mute indifference", the American minister wrote. "Yuan had not won the heart of the people, who regarded him as a masterful individual dwelling in remote seclusion whose contact with them came through taxes and executions." The people of the capital, the American minister thought, still carried the old traditions of imperial splendour and of rulers who were remote and half divine. They were, he wrote, "as yet only onlookers at the pageant of history." As the cortege moved on, paper money was thrown into the air to pacify the spirits, as old Chinese funeral custom required. A piece of it fell on the American minister, and he kept it, as he put it, "as a characteristic memento." The diplomats stepped out of the procession before it passed through the southernmost gate of the Imperial City, and watched the mourners and the bier go by. The American minister walked back to the Legation Quarter with the Russian minister. Both men were deeply impressed, and they agreed that in ceremony and pageantry the Chinese stood supreme. The body was going home, to the dead man's family estate in Henan province, where a large tomb, begun as part of his plans to become emperor, was now ready for him. His name was Yuan Shikai, and for four years he had ruled China as president of its republic. And the city he had ruled watched him leave without a tear. Why? And what happened to China once he was gone? That is where this season begins. Welcome to the first episode of a new season. Over the next thirty three years, China would be torn apart by rival generals, swept by a revolution in ideas, invaded by Japan and fought over in a civil war. Two parties would rise out of the wreckage, the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party. They would join forces, turn on each other, join forces again against Japan, and then fight it out for the whole country. And in 1949, one of them would stand in Beijing and declare a new state, the People's Republic of China, while the other fled to the island of Taiwan. We are going to follow a handful of people through all of it, so let me introduce them. That summer, none of them looked like much. Sun Yat-sen, a doctor turned revolutionary who had spent most of his life in exile raising money for the overthrow of the dynasty, and had been, for the first months of 1912, the republic's first provisional president. As Yuan began to fall, he came back to Shanghai from exile, one of the many enemies of Yuan who were racing home. Chiang Kai-shek, a twenty eight year old soldier from the coastal province of Zhejiang, who had studied military science in Japan and seen action in the revolution of 1911. His mentor in revolution, a man named Chen Qimei, had just been murdered, on Yuan's orders. Mao Zedong, the son of a farmer in Hunan province, twenty two years old and a student at a teachers' college in Hunan's capital, Changsha, reading everything he could find. Zhou Enlai, eighteen, a bright student at a modern school in the northern port of Tianjin. And Wang Jingwei, the most romantic hero of the revolution, who in 1910 had tried to blow up the regent of the Qing court with a bomb, and been sentenced to prison for life, until the revolution set him free. Two of these men would lead the Kuomintang. One would lead the Communists, and another would stand at his side for four decades. And one would end his life at the head of a government under Japanese occupation. This season stands on the work of Peter Zarrow, and of Alexander Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, and this episode also on Bertrand Russell, T'ang Leang-li and M. T. Z. Tyau.

Chinese and Japanese representatives in a group photo after signing the Twenty-One Demands, 1915
Chinese and Japanese representatives in a group photo after signing the Twenty-One Demands, 1915. Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

So who was Yuan Shikai? To understand why his death mattered so much, we need to step back. He was born in 1859 into a landed family in Henan, in the great northern plain. He failed the imperial examinations, the old road into government, and went into the army instead. In his twenties he was China's man in Korea, working for the great statesman of the day, Li Hongzhang, to keep the Japanese out. Those of you who followed Yuan Shikai through the last season have watched him climb every step of the way from there. After China lost a war with Japan in 1895, Yuan was given the job of drilling a new army near Tianjin, the port that guards the approach to Beijing. Out of northern troops he built whatever China had in the way of a modern army. The officers he trained became his men, and they would stay his men for life. In 1911, when revolution broke out against the Qing dynasty, the court called Yuan back to save it. Instead, he bargained the boy emperor off the throne, and in 1912 he became president of the new Republic of China. A newly elected parliament wanted to limit his powers. He quarrelled with it, made himself independent of its power over the purse by borrowing from foreign banks, and when the south rose against him in 1913, he quickly crushed the revolt. In November 1913 he outlawed Sun Yat-sen's party, the Kuomintang, dispersed the parliament and suspended the constitution. By stages, he made himself virtually the absolute ruler of China, and he sent his army lieutenants out to govern the provinces as military governors. That was the man who sat in the presidential palace when Japan came for him. The First World War had broken out in Europe the summer before. Japan, Britain's ally, joined in and seized Germany's colony on the coast of Shandong province, the port of Qingdao, along with the German railway that ran inland to Jinan, the provincial capital. With the Europeans slaughtering each other, Japan had a clear field in China. Japan's leaders saw their country as a latecomer, playing catch up against great odds. The European empires were already established, Western merchants were everywhere, and America and Russia had expanded right across their continents to face Japan. Some Japanese wanted a strong China as a partner against Western imperialism. Others wanted a place at the table where the West was carving China up. Japan's policy swung between the two. On the eighteenth of January 1915, the Japanese minister in Beijing called on Yuan in person and handed him a list of twenty one demands, arranged in five groups. Even the delivery broke the rules. Demands like these should have gone to China's foreign minister. They went straight to the president, against all diplomatic etiquette. The minister also had a message to go with them. Many Chinese revolutionaries, he said, had close friends in Japan, and Japan might not be able to restrain them from stirring up trouble, unless China gave some positive proof of friendship. The Japanese people believed Yuan was anti-Japanese, he went on. If Yuan granted these demands, they would be convinced otherwise, and the Japanese government could then help him. Yuan sat silent through all of it. The blow stunned him. All he could say was, "You cannot expect me to say anything to-night." The Chinese noticed that the paper the demands were written on was watermarked with dreadnoughts and machine guns. They did not think that was an accident. What was in the demands? The first groups were bad enough. Japan was to keep control of Shandong, have its interests recognised in Manchuria and Mongolia, gain new business rights in the province of Fujian, across the strait from Japan's colony of Taiwan, and take a share in the great Hanyeping iron and coal company in central China. But the fifth group was the most serious. China was to employ Japanese political, financial and military advisers, police in important places were to be run jointly with Japan, and China was to buy at least half its munitions from Japan. Taken together, the last set of demands would have given Japan a share in Chinese government at every level. Tokyo had warned that the demands must be kept in the utmost secrecy. But a few days later the American minister found one of the Chinese ministers so shaken that he confided in him, almost in tears. "Control of natural resources, finances, army!" the minister said. "What will be left to China!" That week the foreigners of Beijing held an ice festival at the skating rink of the American legation guard, and at the festival a man sought the American minister out and accosted him. He was a British journalist, born in China, who wrote under the name Putnam Weale. "While we are gambolling here," the journalist said, "the sovereignty of the country is passing like a cloud to the east. It is Korea over again." Korea had been a kingdom that Japan first advised, then guarded, and in 1910 simply annexed. Every Chinese official knew it. And now, for once in his career, Yuan did something unexpected. He let the public in. He deliberately leaked the contents of the demands, hoping that a storm of popular protest would force Japan to back off. Across China, people boycotted Japanese goods, though Japan paid it no heed. In the cities, Chinese women had been wearing their hair in the Japanese pompadour style since Japan beat Russia ten years earlier. Now, at once, the patriotic women of China banned the Japanese hairstyle. Nor did Yuan simply sit and wait. He posted a hundred thousand picked troops and a hundred and twenty guns around the capital, and he had the full demands brought to the notice of the Allied governments abroad. He hoped, above all, for America. But President Wilson had already written privately to the American minister that any direct intervention on China's behalf would probably do her more harm than good, since it would excite the hostility of Japan, and that hostility would fall first on China herself. And when Washington raised objections, Japan's ambassador there assured the Americans that the fifth group were not really demands at all, merely requests for friendly consideration. Through the spring the negotiations ground on, two or three long sessions every week, and Japan sent more troops into Manchuria and Shandong. On the eleventh of March, the Chinese were told that a Japanese fleet had sailed for Chinese ports under sealed orders. On the twenty third of March, the American minister went to see Yuan, and found him greatly worried but still good humoured. "The buzzing gnats disturb my sleep," Yuan told him, "but they have not yet carried off my rice. So I can live." Then he grew serious. "I am prepared to make all possible concessions. But they must not diminish Chinese independence." Japanese officials kept telling the Chinese that America would not protest, Yuan said. If only America would say, gently but firmly, that such questions could not be settled without it, Yuan felt, the danger would largely dissolve. By the end of March, China had given way on almost everything Japan wanted in Shandong and Manchuria. What it would not give was the fifth group. From the first of May, Yuan's councillors met every day at his residence. There were violent scenes. Some of them argued that submitting would mean the break up of the nation, that it would rob the government of all authority, and that resisting would rally the country behind it. Japan might occupy more of China, they said, but occupation did not create rights, and when the European war was over, help would come. But the government feared that defying Japan, with the whole world at war, would mean China being carved up. Then Yuan and his Foreign Office made their mistake. Panic stricken at the thought of an ultimatum, they offered Japan concessions on points in the fifth group itself, on the hiring of advisers. The Japanese minister saw how far China could be driven. He replied, calmly, that his instructions left him no choice. The ultimatum would have to be presented. On the seventh of May, at three in the afternoon, Japan delivered an ultimatum. It gave China a little over forty eight hours, until six in the evening of the ninth of May, to answer. On the eighth, the cabinet and the Council of State sat nearly all day, and decided that the ultimatum had to be accepted. Facing the ultimatum, Yuan agreed to all the demands except the last set, the fifth group, which Japan agreed to set aside for later. In the official words of the Chinese government, it gave its consent "however unwillingly", to keep the peace and to spare the Chinese people unnecessary suffering. On the twenty fifth of May 1915, China signed the treaties. "A shiver of impotent rage passed over the country", the journalist wrote, "when the nature and acceptance of the Japanese Ultimatum became generally known." For years afterward, patriotic Chinese printed a reminder on their writing paper and their china: "Forget not the national disgrace". Young people were the most indignant of all. One student, Mao Zedong, wrote: "The 7th of May dishonors our Motherland. How can we students take revenge? With our very lives!" Remember those students. In a few years, their anger would change China. And Yuan? He had given way, but he had kept the worst of it off the table, and he had calculated that compromise with Japan would buy him its support. What he wanted that support for, it turned out, was a throne.

Here is what had been running through Yuan's mind, even as the Japanese pressed him. Japan's minister had dropped a hint when he handed over the demands, that a ruler who was already virtually an emperor could settle the whole business and secure his position at one blow. Yuan was too wary of Japan to take that bait at face value. But the words sank in. Inside his own family, people had been talking for a long time about something more permanent than a president's chair. The loudest voice was his eldest son's, a young man left half paralysed by an injury, who had steeped himself in books about Napoleon and meant to succeed his father as rightful heir. The son, the journalist wrote, "daily preached to his father the necessity of plucking the pear as soon as it was ripe." The clues had been there for a while. In December 1914, before the Japanese demands even arrived, Yuan had put on his field marshal's uniform, climbed into an armoured car and driven south on a road covered in yellow sand to the Temple of Heaven. There he changed into a purple sacrificial robe embroidered with dragons and a headdress of the imperial style, and prayed to Heaven on behalf of the Republic of China. For centuries, only the emperor had worshipped Heaven at that altar. It was the most sacred of all the rites of the throne. Now, with the Japanese crisis behind him, Yuan made his fateful decision. He would found a new dynasty of his own. It was not as mad as it sounds. For years, reformers and even revolutionaries had asked how a backward people could ever understand a republic. Yuan would not be an old style emperor. He would be a modern constitutional monarch, like the emperor of Japan or the kings of Europe. His reign name was to be Hongxian, the Grand Constitutional era. A reign name was the title an emperor gave to the years of his rule, and the calendar was counted by it. And a throne might give Yuan the standing to resist Japan and the Western powers, as a mere president never could. His own men put the case to the American minister plainly. Chinese tradition, one of them said, was built on personal relationships, and the people did not think in abstractions. "The Chinese cannot conceive of personal duties toward a pure abstraction." Under an emperor, he argued, authority would sit more securely, and a real reform of the land tax might at last be carried through. Yuan himself, in October, assumed complete indifference. If the people voted for the existing system, he told the American minister, matters would simply remain as they were. In August 1915, a scholar named Yang Du, one of Yuan's men, set up a society to argue that the only road to lasting peace was to replace the republic with a constitutional monarchy, with Yuan as emperor. Yang published a pamphlet warning that the country could enjoy peace while Yuan lived, but the moment anything happened to him, the shops would close, the troops would run wild and foreign warships would enter China's harbours. Yuan also had an American legal adviser, Frank Goodnow. Goodnow was one of the leading American scholars of government of his day. In a memorandum that summer, Goodnow wrote that he had "no doubt in saying that the monarchical system is better suited to China than the Republican system." He added conditions. No change should be made if it roused the opposition of the Chinese people or the foreign powers. Those conditions vanished like chaff when the monarchists printed his memorandum for the public. What remained was that an American scholar of world repute had come out against the republic. Not everyone would play along. The man Yuan most wanted on his side was the brilliant reformer Liang Qichao. Liang had been one of the leaders of a failed reform movement at court in 1898 and had spent years in exile in Japan, where his essays taught a generation of young Chinese to think of themselves as a nation. He refused to lend himself to the plan, gave up his post as minister of justice, and retired to the foreign concession at Tianjin. In his denunciation of the scheme, he argued that a change in how a government was conducted was progress. A change in the very form of the government, from monarchy to republic or back again, was revolution, and revolution always held a nation back. The effect was electrical. A stream of officials resigned rather than serve an emperor. One of them was Yuan's closest military associate, the minister of war, Duan Qirui. Duan was an officer from Anhui province who had studied artillery in Germany and had served Yuan for twenty years. In the revolution of 1911, it was his refusal to fight on that had helped force the dynasty to abdicate and make way for Yuan. Now he resigned, and, so the story went, slipped out of Beijing dressed as a common labourer. Remember Duan. He is going to matter a great deal. The foreign powers were uneasy too. On the twenty ninth of October, the Japanese chargé d'affaires and the British, French and Russian ministers called at the Foreign Office one after another and gave what they called friendly counsel, that it would be better to stop the monarchy movement. Japan had changed its mind. Some Japanese leaders had signalled support for a new dynasty, then turned against it, and Japan would even sell arms to Yuan's opponents, among them its old friend Sun Yat-sen. But it was too late to stop. In November, delegates were chosen across the country to vote on the form of the state, and their votes came in for Yuan. The assembly that Yuan himself had appointed elected him emperor with remarkable unanimity, one thousand nine hundred and ninety three votes to none. One of Yuan's ministers told the American minister, "We tried to get some people to vote in the negative just for appearance's sake, but they would not do it." Then came the ritual. Twice Yuan refused the throne. When it was offered a third time, having exhausted the traditional forms of polite refusal, he accepted. "I should rather be condoled with than congratulated", the emperor elect said, "for I am giving up my personal freedom and that of my descendants for the public service." He would rather be farming and fishing on his estate in Henan, he added, than tussling with the problems of state. His ministers reported these sayings as proof of a self sacrificing, benevolent monarch. Most of the foreign envoys in Beijing were ready to recognise the new empire on New Year's Day. The German and Austrian ministers hurried to offer Yuan their congratulations, which embarrassed the Chinese not a little. Foreign advisers sent messages of devotion, the Japanese among them, though not the Americans. Yuan's Japanese adviser wrote in the traditional language of the imperial court. The preparations were lavish. There was to be a whole new nobility. The military governors and cabinet ministers would be dukes and marquises, and the barons, the American minister wrote, would be "as many as the sands of the sea." The vice president, Li Yuanhong, was offered the title of prince. He refused it. New robes for the emperor and his court were designed after the ceremonial robes of the Japanese imperial house. The great coronation halls in the Imperial City were cleaned and repainted, and the making of a nicely upholstered throne was given to a general store in Beijing, which one foreign countess in the city found highly amusing. Yuan's reign was to start on the first of January 1916, by the new Western calendar rather than the old one.

Cai E Into Sichuan Into Guangxi Guizhou joins Yuan's troops win the race Feng Guozhang Southern military council Yunnan Sichuan Guangxi Guizhou Chongqing Nanjing Guangzhou Cai E's Yunnan army Yuan Shikai's northern troops Feng Guozhang
The war against the throne, 1916-01. Map drawn by Then and There from the episode's sources, on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines and rivers
Generals of the Yunnan National Protection Army, including Cai E, 1915
Generals of the Yunnan National Protection Army, including Cai E, 1915. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On Christmas Day 1915, word reached Beijing that an opposition movement had broken out in Yunnan, the mountainous province in the far southwest, on the border of French Indochina. It was led by a young general named Cai E. Cai E had been Liang Qichao's disciple since 1898, and he had been military governor of Yunnan. Yuan had enticed him to Beijing, and there, as a member of the Council of State, he lived under the dictator's watchful eye. How Cai E got out of Beijing became a legend, and the story was told like this. He staged a furious quarrel with his wife and had the police called to see his family and all their belongings sent away to Tianjin, since he would no longer live under the same roof with them. Then, alone in the capital, he seemed to give himself up to pleasure, spending his nights among the courtesans of the city's pleasure district, until the suspicions of the government were thoroughly lulled. One dawn a singing girl let him out by the back door of her house. He went to the railway station and reached Tianjin unseen. It was late morning before the detectives found that the bird had flown. Telegrams went out ordering his arrest, but a bare quarter of an hour before the police began their search, he had boarded a Japanese steamer in the river at Tianjin with his family. From Japan he made his way south, by Hong Kong and the French railway from Indochina, into Yunnan, where he found everything nearly ready for revolt, except arms and ammunition. Yuan, furious, telegraphed his agents in Yunnan to kill him on sight. Cai E was warned in time. From Yunnan came telegrams to the capital, and a brave newspaper editor in Beijing printed them. The question of changing the state, they said, had filled the public mind with consternation. "Our blood runs cold when we face the dangers at the door." "Not once but twice hath the President taken the oath to observe and obey the Constitution and protect and maintain the Republic." The vote for monarchy, they said, was the work of ignoble men, and everyone knew it had been won by bribery and intimidation. Cancel the monarchy at once, they demanded, and execute the men who had promoted it. Yunnan declared its independence. Cai E led the armies, and Liang Qichao led the politics. The rising became known as the National Protection War, the war to protect the republic. And the dead unanimity of the vote was suddenly broken. Now voices of opposition came from every side. Cai E's plan was to come down suddenly out of the mountains of Yunnan into Sichuan, seize the river city of Chongqing on the upper Yangtze, and close that vast province to Yuan's northern armies. He was an excellent soldier, and the plan might have been brilliant. But he had been forced to launch his revolt two weeks early, and Yuan's troops raced up the Yangtze rapids in commandeered junks. They reached Chongqing first. In the mountain fighting that followed, the Yunnan men were outgunned and short of supplies, and fell back on guerrilla warfare. The original Yunnan force was nearly wiped out, and many of the survivors died of disease and exposure. Even so, the generals loyal to Yuan could not drive the Yunnan troops out of Sichuan. And Japan was not neutral. About a thousand rebels rode the Japanese controlled railway from Qingdao into the heart of Shandong with their machine guns, while the same railway refused to carry government troops, on the ground that it had to stay neutral. When asked about it, the railway's officials said the rebels must have been in civilian clothes, and must have carried their weapons as baggage. So why could Yuan not crush the rising? Look at his generals. A mild but strangely debilitating illness seemed to spread through the upper ranks of his army. As the civil war came on, Yuan could find hardly a reliable general who was not on the sick list. The truth was that his own protégés had seen what a monarchy would mean. Power would pass to Yuan's widely despised son, not to them. So they sat it out. And they had discovered other things. The two men who held the greatest military power in central China were Feng Guozhang, at Nanjing, and Zhang Xun. Comparing notes when they met, they found that Yuan had set each of them to watch the other. Then Yuan ordered the commander of the garrison at Shanghai, an admiral, to have Feng Guozhang killed. The admiral warned Feng instead, and was himself shot dead in the streets of Shanghai for it. After that, Feng quietly let the republicans know that he would join them. And when Yuan ordered him to Beijing, where he could be watched, Feng found one excuse after another to stay at Nanjing with his army. So, against long odds, the southern militarists won some victories. Guizhou followed Yunnan almost at once. In February, Yuan announced that his enthronement would be delayed indefinitely. In the middle of March, Guangxi demanded the cancellation of the monarchy, and with Feng Guozhang now on the side of the revolt, the whole country seemed to be rising. On the twenty second of March 1916, with more provinces falling away, Yuan issued a decree cancelling the monarchy. He would stay on as president of the republic instead. The reign he had begun on the first of January was over. The "eighty-three days dream" had ended. In his decree, Yuan insisted he had only ever bowed to the will of the people's representatives. But he also wrote that his sincerity had not won the hearts of the people, and "I have myself alone to blame for lack of virtue." It did him no good. The rebels took the climb down as a confession of defeat, and his own military men felt he had surrendered and got nothing for it. "Thus the President lost his friends", the American minister wrote, "and failed to placate his enemies." By the middle of April, five provinces had declared their independence: Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong and Zhejiang. Yuan called Duan Qirui back to be premier, hoping that the old soldier's return would strengthen him in the eyes of the rebels. In the south, the rebel provinces set up their own government at Guangzhou, and in May they declared that Yuan had stopped being president the moment he accepted the throne. The rightful president, they said, was the vice president, Li Yuanhong. Li, always prudent, declined the honour. Sun Yat-sen's return gave the movement a powerful push. Ever since his own days as president at Nanjing, he had warned his countrymen about Yuan's ambitions, and Yuan's grab for the throne convinced them he had been right.

Yuan Shikai's funeral procession passing the Qianmen gate in Peking, 1916
Yuan Shikai's funeral procession passing the Qianmen gate in Peking, 1916. Rowanwindwhistler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Yuan was breaking. He had lived a life of intense, sedentary work. Years before, he had developed Bright's disease, a disease of the kidneys, and his strong constitution had fought it off. Now, under the strain, his strength failed. One of the few men still loyal to him, Zhou Ziqi, described the change to the American minister. "The President's power of quick decision has left him", he said. Once it was yes or no in an instant, the minister said. Now Yuan ruminated, wavered and changed a decision many times. He talked of resigning, and even of going to America. In the second half of May he was confined to his room, though he still read his telegrams. In early June he seemed to be getting better. The American minister had gone to the seaside at Beidaihe to settle his family in for the summer. Before he left, he gave his staff a special code, in which the word Pan stood for Yuan Shikai. On the afternoon of the sixth of June, he received a telegram of three words. "Pan is dead." Yuan had died a few minutes after ten that morning, of uremia, at fifty six. Uremia is a poisoning of the blood that sets in when the kidneys fail. He had made himself worse, the American minister learned, by taking the medicine a foreign doctor prescribed together with all sorts of Chinese remedies his women pressed on him. It was said he died of a broken heart. During his last night, his sons and his old ally Xu Shichang, a former premier, were with him. To Xu, Yuan made a solemn declaration. It had not been his wish to become emperor, he said. He had been deceived into believing that the people demanded it, and that the country needed it. After saying this he seemed exhausted, and went on sinking until the end. Before he died, he had written that the presidency should pass to the vice president, Li Yuanhong. His last mandate called Li "a man of courtesy, good nature, benevolence and wisdom," and among the ministers who signed it was Duan Qirui. The Allied ministers called at once on Duan to ask whether the government could keep order. And in a city at the far end of a world war, the German and Austrian commanders of the legation guards sat down with the Allied commanders to agree on how to protect the foreign quarter. It was probably the only time in the whole war that soldiers of both sides met to plan anything together. So was he telling the truth, that last night? He had never been a confident emperor. He showed a deep ambivalence about the throne, and an indecision quite unlike him, and he did not reach for it the way the founders of the old dynasties had. He seems to have believed what Goodnow and many of his advisers believed, that the people were too ignorant and the country too backward for a republic. But he misread his own country. Conservatives who still took monarchy seriously saw him as the man who had betrayed the Qing, and liberals thought a monarchy a step backward. They might have accepted him as a military dictator. They would not accept him as an emperor. And the mass of the people, who had not understood the republic, did not understand his new ceremonies either. Yuan's power had always been personal. The men who held the key posts in Beijing and the provinces were loyal to him, and even that loyalty had conditions. Now the military governors Yuan had appointed refused to submit to the central government once his strong hand was removed. There followed a period in which there was no effective central government at all. So the funeral we began with carried more than one man out of Beijing. It carried away the strong hand that had kept the military governors submitting to the central government.

Duan Qirui
Duan Qirui. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But that was not how it looked in the first week of June. In the first week, it looked as if the republic might work after all. Within an hour of Yuan's death, Duan Qirui, the premier, called on the vice president, Li Yuanhong, and welcomed him as president of the republic. It was a striking call. Years before, during the revolution, Duan had been sent to the Yangtze to bring Li back to Beijing as a captive. Li Yuanhong was an army officer who, in 1911, had been forced by the rebels at Wuchang to lead the uprising that toppled the dynasty, and had been vice president of the republic ever since. Under Yuan he had lived on an island in the palace grounds, surrounded by guards who were said to be there for his protection but were really there to watch him. His friends had feared for his life. Some Americans in Beijing had even been ready to try a rescue, should his situation become perilous. Now, by one o'clock that afternoon, the ministers of the Allied powers were told at the Foreign Office that Li had taken office and that the capital was secure. The police and the gendarmerie were taking every precaution. On the seventh of June, the cabinet came to President Li and, with a simple ceremony and three deferential bows, pledged allegiance. All the provinces accepted him, peaceably and unanimously. Duan and Yuan's old secretary, Liang Shiyi, arranged the handover between them, so quietly and in such good order that the foreigners in Beijing began to think much more highly of Chinese republicanism. The American minister met the new president soon afterward, at a reception for the diplomats in a private house. Li received them standing, his ministers and twelve generals around him in uniform. He made a few friendly remarks, but he looked far more serious than usual. And Duan, the strong man, the one who held the army? He looked disconsolate, standing with his head bowed and his epaulets sloping down onto his chest. The American minister could not tell whether his spirit was as sad as he looked. But Duan, he thought, probably saw a great many difficulties ahead.

On the afternoon of Yuan's funeral, the American minister called on President Li in his library, the desk and side tables piled with papers and books. Li felt relieved, no longer guarded and confined, and he was as simple and optimistic as ever. He had found a way, he said, to win over every faction. "I will declare the Provisional Constitution of 1912 to be in force," he said, "and summon the old parliament; but its membership should be reduced by one half; it is too unwieldy." That constitution had been written to make the president little more than a figurehead, in the hands of a cabinet that answered to an elected parliament. The parliament was to meet for one job only, Li said, to finish writing China's permanent constitution. The American minister asked whether he really thought a parliament, once summoned, could be kept to a single task. Would it not try to take control of the government? "No," the president insisted. Li did what he said, or most of it. He brought back the constitution of 1912 and recalled the parliament of 1913, the one Yuan had dispersed, and Duan stayed on as premier, with a cabinet remade to include men from the revolutionary party. In July the rebel government in Guangzhou dissolved itself. On paper, China was one country again, with a parliamentary system. Duan's view of all this was not hard to read. He had won the trust of many Chinese by refusing to serve Yuan's monarchy, and he was in a strong position. "I do not expect much good," he told the American minister, "from the return of parliament; there will be endless party struggles and interference with the Administration." "But as to this curious modern method of governing through talk, which fundamentally I see no virtue in, I am willing to give it a fair trial." On the first of August 1916, the parliament met again. For its first month, the parliament did nothing to justify its critics. It was not rash, and its members put the country's unity ahead of their parties. The generals waited, as if ready to give it a chance. It elected a new vice president, Feng Guozhang, the general who had stayed at Nanjing with his army and whose change of sides had saved the revolt against Yuan. But the new minister of the interior, a party politician from the parliament, told the American minister that it could not stop at finishing the constitution. It must also control the government. "A contest for power was inevitable, it seemed," the American minister wrote, "between the Premier and the parliament."

And behind the parliament stood the guns. Cabinet government was only a form. Duan was premier and minister of war at once, and the mouthpiece of the military governors of the north. Those governors were nominally appointed by Beijing, but in practice they depended only on the favour of the soldiers in their provinces. Their title was dujun, which simply means military governor. Yuan's officers had been one family, his northern army. After his death that family split into three. One group, named for the province of Zhili, gathered around the generals Cao Kun and Wu Peifu. Another, named for Fengtian, followed Zhang Zuolin. The third, which would become known as the Anfu clique, was Duan Qirui's own. Zhili was the province around Beijing, and Fengtian the southernmost province of Manchuria. And in the south, the real power lay with what one Chinese writer called successful military adventurers. The armies of all these militarists filled their ranks with uprooted peasants and men with no other work, and they began to fight one another in civil war after civil war. The Western powers, eager to sell China arms and win new privileges, encouraged it. The revolution of 1911 and the risings against Yuan had armed Chinese society, and what followed, from 1916 to 1927, would be called the warlord era. The dujun governed in defiance of Beijing, intercepted the revenue and let their troops terrorise the people on whom they were quartered. Their wars, a visitor from Britain wrote a few years later, were not usually about any principle at all, but simply about which general would govern which group of provinces. What did that feel like from below? Look at Hunan, where Mao Zedong was studying. For three years Hunan had been ruled by one of Yuan's protégés, a general the Hunanese called Butcher Tang, who banned every kind of political activity, student meetings included, and put thousands of people to death. In June 1916, as Yuan's power collapsed, Butcher Tang fled to Shanghai disguised as a peasant. And the young Mao, of all people, was sorry to see him go. In a letter to a friend he wrote that Tang should not have been sent away, because under him, as he put it, "Order was restored, and the peaceful times of the past were practically regained." Mao was becoming convinced that only force earned respect, and that only a strong hand could unite and revive China. Hold on to that. In a country where the government had stopped governing, even the young idealists were learning to admire the gun. So that is one way to tell the story of the next decade: chaos. Generals with private armies, a capital that changed hands, a parliament nobody obeyed. But hold on to that verdict for a while, because this season will test it. Some of those generals ran their provinces seriously. And in the very years the warlords fought, young Chinese were inventing new ways to think, to write and to organise, and two parties were taking shape that would one day sweep the warlords away. Was it only chaos? Or was it also the time when modern Chinese politics was born? Keep that question in mind. And the first test of the new order came quickly. In early 1917 the Allies and America pressed China to join the war against Germany. Duan Qirui wanted in, and President Li feared that Duan meant to take all his power. Their quarrel would bring the generals into open revolt, and it would bring Zhang Xun, the general whose soldiers still wore the queue of the old dynasty, marching into Beijing as a peacemaker. What he did when he got there is the strangest story of the warlord years. Next time: the emperor who came back.

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