Brief History of the Chinese Warlords, 1920-1937
In China’s long history the massive size of its empire both past and present creates many geographical, cultural, and chronological problems when dealing with the study of Chinese warfare in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This issue is prevalent in our Western understanding of China after the Revolution of 1911 which succeeded in the overthrow of the the Qing Empire. China ’s first attempt at a more republican form of government was come to be a fragile coalition of Warlords who in 1912 signed a series of treaties and alliances to form the Beiyang government in what is today Beijing, China . The Beiyang Star, a political and military symbol of the 5 major regions (Warlord cliques) of China under Beiyang Rule Two of the smaller warlord cliques in the earliest era, Kuomintang (Nationalist dominated, but nominally a Marxist-Leninist party as well) and the independent Chinese Communist Party, later struggled for control over all of China after 1928 and beyond, only interrupt...