Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
soon convinced himself and a coterie of Western advisors, including
an American who had been president of Johns Hopkins University,
that China was not ready for republican rule and was much more
suited for a monarchy. Accordingly, he had a constitution drawn up
in 1914 that gave him unlimited power and the lifelong right to rule
over China. The Japanese helped him, flattered that he admired the
imperial style of governance in post-Meiji Japan. To curry favor with
them, he gave in to Japan's infamous Twenty-one Demands, which
included such humiliating provisions as Japanese control of key
Chinese industries, including steel production. This became intoler-
able to many provinces, and in late 1915 a southern province declared
its independence of his rule. Several provinces followed suit, and once
again a regime collapsed. By May 1916, Yuan found himself aban-
doned by several provinces and his erstwhile Japanese supporters,
and he died the next month.
THE WARLORD PERIOD
The collapse of Yuan's regime led to a decade of chaos and division
in China. It produced a power vacuum that no regime could hope to
fill, and China disintegrated into several geopolitical regions, all more
or less dominated by military commanders dubbed “warlords” by
Western writers. The warlord period was so confusing that most
foreign governments simply chose to recognize whichever regime
occupied Beijing as the legitimate government of China. Warlords
fought and allied with one another in an execrable and Byzantine
pattern of intrigue, cooperation, and betrayal. Several civil wars
between warlord armies raged, and almost invariably the warlords
claimed to be fighting not for their own selfish purposes but for the
good of China. While it is easy to be cynical about these claims, it is
important to remember that few if any of the warlords claimed to be
legitimate governments; in their view, political legitimacy would come
after they had established order in China. They did not usually
pretend to be governments in their own right, although they certainly
dominated many local and regional governments and often intimi-
dated them into doing their bidding. And they craved the legitimacy
and recognition that could be conferred on them by official govern-
mental documents and properly signed and sealed appointments.
Many even sought to have their photographs and biographies
published (in Chinese and English) in the “who's who in China” topics
popular in the early twentieth century.
