The Beiyang Fall: Cause for Celebration? | Shenzhou Dadi Ep.30 · 神州大地 · 第一季

A presidency bought with cash.
Shenzhou Dadi. Episode Thirty. The Beiyang Fall: Cause for Celebration?
Last time we followed the secret war in the south: Guangzhou, Wuchang, and that breathless night aboard the Zhongshan gunboat. Now turn the lens north, and you will see a different collapse - quieter, and far more fatal.
Five thousand silver dollars bought one vote. Tens of millions bought the dragon throne of a republic.
Yet in the year before that absurd transaction, Beijing's newspapers still pointed at the president and called him a thief to his face, and its universities still made room for every school of thought, left and right, new and old. An age in which even the presidency could be priced turned out to be one of the loosest, liveliest periods in modern Chinese history.
Corruption and vitality grew on the same vine. That vine was the Beiyang system.
And the Beiyang curtain did not fall with one gunshot. It fell as a serial drama, one actor replacing another: a president who bought his chair, a general who changed sides, a statesman travelling north, an army taking its oath in Guangzhou. We begin with the chair that had a price tag.
Two threads, then. Let us take the north first.
Cao Kun, the Zhili strongman who bought his way into the presidency, believed he had purchased the country. What he had purchased was a one-way ticket to a cliff.
October fifth, nineteen twenty-three, Beijing. The House of Representatives met at Xiangfang Bridge outside the Xuanwu Gate to elect a president. Cao Kun's men put a public price on every ballot: five thousand silver dollars a vote, paid on the spot. The deputies queued, took their money, and raised their hands. Later accounts reckoned the whole business at no less than tens of millions of silver dollars. A president of a republic had been given a price.
The deputies who took the money were nicknamed the piglet deputies - a hundred and thirty-five of them. Wu Jinglian, speaker of the House, had been promised the premiership after the election. Instead Cao Kun nominated Sun Baoqi. Wu stuffed the speaker's seal into his pocket and fled Beijing by night. When even the spoils cannot be divided evenly, you can imagine the foundations of that purchased regime.
But fairness requires the other half of the picture. In those same years Beijing's press still abused the president in print, and its universities still tolerated left and right, radicals and conservatives. An age that let the presidency be bought also let you say so out loud. That looseness was not seen again for a very long time.
Historians have never agreed on the bribery. One reading calls it the moment constitutional government in the republic finally collapsed, with the presidency turned into a silver-dollar trade. Another points out that the parliament had long been broken by the warlords, and that vote-buying did not begin with Cao Kun - only that this time the price was posted too openly, and too uglily, to ignore.
Two threads. Now the south.
While the deputies in the north were counting silver dollars, three young men in the mountains of Guangxi were piecing their broken province back together, piece by piece.
Li Zongren, born eighteen ninety-one, from Lingui, brought the Pacify Guangxi Army he had fought out of Yulin. Bai Chongxi, born eighteen ninety-three, from Guilin, was the mind of the trio and served as chief of staff. Huang Shaohong, born eighteen ninety-five, from Rong County, had been a regimental commander under Shen Hongying; in nineteen twenty-three he broke with Shen, seized Wuzhou, and joined hands with Li Zongren. All three were about the same age, all three were stubborn, and together they fitted: one who dared to fight, one who could calculate, one who could hold the rear.
In nineteen twenty-four their two forces met on the Xun River and became the Pacify Guangxi and Punish the Traitors Army: Li Zongren as commander-in-chief, Huang Shaohong as deputy commander and provincial governor, Bai Chongxi as chief of staff. One to strike, one to keep house, one to plan. Three men squeezed a province of loose sand into a single fist.
That fist struck first at Lu Rongting, the old master of the Guangxi clique.
They did not use brute force. In the spring of nineteen twenty-four Lu Rongting was pinned inside Guilin by another warlord, Shen Hongying. Shen sent two divisions under Deng Youwen and Shen Rongguang to surround the city so tightly that not a man could slip through; the assault went on day and night for more than seventy days. Li, Bai and Huang saw their chance: Lu's best troops were nailed to Guilin, and his base at Nanning lay empty. They settled on a stratagem - ally with Shen, bring down Lu. Instead of meeting Lu head-on, they waited until he pulled his Nanning garrison north. In late June Bai Chongxi moved overland through Binyang, Shanglin and Wuming; Li Zongren came up the river from Guixian straight at Nanning; Huang Shaohong stayed at Wuzhou as the inside anchor. Three routes closed, and the old master's nest was taken almost without a fight. The seal of the Guangxi military governor's office was still warm when Governor Zhang Qihuang packed his valuables and slipped away through Annam to Wu Peifu.
With his base gone, Lu Rongting in Guilin became a tree without roots. On July ninth the three men raised the banner of the United Pacify Guangxi Army at Nanning: eleven columns and six guerrilla units, in three routes. The right, under Li and Bai, drove at Liuzhou and Guilin; the centre, under Yu Zuobai, cleared Lu's remnants around Du'an and Nama; the left, under Hu Zongduo, pushed all the way to Longzhou and drove what was left of Lu across the Vietnamese border. On August eleventh Bai Chongxi took Liuzhou. On September twenty-first Lu Rongting announced his retirement from the Xiangshan Temple and left for Shanghai to live as a private citizen. The Old Guangxi Clique, which had held the province for more than a decade, came apart.
Shen Hongying still stood in the way. With Lu gone he occupied Guilin, Pingle and Liuzhou and wanted the province for himself. On January twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty-five, he struck at Li and Huang in three columns. Li Zongren refused a head-on clash; he avoided the strong point, massed against the weak one, and destroyed each column in turn. Between February and April Shen's left, centre and right were broken one after another at Wuxuan, at Jinzhu'ao in Yongfu, and around Guilin. The last battle came at Liangjiangtang near Guilin: Bai Chongxi laid an ambush on the Luoqing River. As Shen's main force crossed a pontoon bridge, a mountain flood swept down, snapped the bridge and cut their retreat. Two hundred were killed, seven hundred captured, and hundreds drowned in the swollen river. Shen Hongying disguised himself as a merchant and escaped through Guangdong to Hong Kong. I never imagined I would be beaten by a few little company commanders, he told the press as he left. Those little company commanders were Li, Bai and Huang - once minor officers in the very same Old Guangxi ranks.
For the first time in more than a decade of chaos, Guangxi had been pulled into one fist by three young men. The fire in the south was lit in these mountains. At its other end lay Guangdong.
Li Zongren later recalled that Guangxi was too poor to feed a large army - and that this very poverty forged the New Guangxi Clique's hard edge. Men with no capital are the ones willing to stake their lives on a knife point. Only when Guangxi was steady did Sun Yat-sen's headquarters next door in Guangdong have a neighbour it could rely on.
Back to the north. In the autumn of nineteen twenty-four, Zhang Zuolin and Wu Peifu, the two strongest men in the Beiyang world, tore off the last layer of courtesy.
On September fifteenth the Fengtian army entered the pass in three columns: one through Shanhaiguan, one through southern Rehe towards Jinzhou, one through northern Rehe at Chengde and Xifengkou. On September eighteenth Wu Peifu took personal command of the Punitive Army and went to meet them. A hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy thousand Fengtian troops, two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand Zhili troops - more than four hundred thousand men hacking at each other along the Shanhaiguan line.
Once the guns started, Cao Kun could not sit still. He sent Wu Peifu to the front in person - and never imagined his own rear would catch fire first.
The Zhili side put Peng Shoushen on the Shanhaiguan front with Zhang Fulai in support; the Fengtian side threw Jiang Dengxuan and Zhang Xueliang into the attack. Around Jiumenkou and Shimenzhai the artillery never stopped, and the casualties were beyond counting. The Zhili and Fengtian cliques had been the two pillars of one Beiyang house; now they were killing each other over who would sit in that chair.
Cao Kun had thought he had bought the country. Only now did he discover he was a piece on Wu Peifu's board - and a piece never decides the game. Wu Peifu, the general who had won so many hard battles, did not see that the real danger was not in the artillery at Shanhaiguan. It was in a quiet coup inside Beijing.
Wu Peifu had won many victories in his life, but he committed the classic error of war: he pushed every able unit to the front and left his rear empty. He trusted the speed of his own blade and forgot that the blade behind him was faster. While the two armies were still trading blows at Shanhaiguan, the board in Beijing had already been changed, quietly.
Two threads - and the south flares again.
Tang Jiyao of Yunnan, born eighteen eighty-three, from Huize, had named himself commander-in-chief of the Sichuan-Guizhou-Yunnan Allied Army and meant to march through Guangxi and swallow the two Guang provinces in one bite. In January nineteen twenty-five he sent two armies into Guangxi: one under Long Yun, out of Guangnan, taking Baise and driving down the You River at Nanning; the other, commanded by Tang Jiyao's own younger brother, entering from Rongjiang in Guizhou, taking Sanjiang and Rong County, and driving down the Rong River at Liuzhou. Together they came to nearly eighty thousand men, and claimed a hundred thousand.
One point must be clear: the northern route was led by Tang Jiyao's younger brother, not by Tang Jiyao himself. Tang Jiyao never left Yunnan. From here on we will call that force the Northern Route Yunnan Army.
What they ran into was the New Guangxi Clique, barely formed into a fist: Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi and Huang Shaohong, twenty thousand men all told, and worse equipped than their enemy.
It was a hard fight against odds, and more than that, a contest of heads. Li Zongren was cold-eyed. He saw the Yunnan army's weak point: the Yunnan-Guangxi-Guizhou border is all high mountains and broken roads; tens of thousands of men cannot pour in at once, they have to be fed forward column by column. Long Yun's spearhead pushed ahead and took Nanning, but the follow-up never arrived - and the spearhead became a living target. Li settled on a plan of beating them one at a time, and Nanning first.
On May sixteenth Li Zongren came to the front to direct the assault on Kunlun Pass. The pass sits on hard ground, easy to defend and hard to take. The Guangxi troops fought a full day and night, losses piled up, and still could not bite through. Seeing Fan Shisheng on the left flank standing still, Li made his decision on the spot: he pulled two columns around to the left to envelop the position. Hit from front and rear, the Yunnan force lost more than two thousand men and gave up Kunlun Pass; the Guangxi troops pursued, took Batang, Qitang and Wutang in succession, and drove Long Yun back inside Nanning.
Nanning's walls were high and thick, and the Guangxi army had no heavy guns to break them. Li simply surrounded the city without attacking, cut the grain, cut the water, and waited to see how long they could hold. The siege ran for the better part of a year. Long Yun grew desperate, offered heavy rewards and formed a suicide corps of more than a thousand men to break out at night; Fan Shisheng, guarding the city, was caught off guard and fell back dozens of miles. Li Zongren heard of it and rushed Yu Zuobai back to the rescue. The breakout force was cut to pieces. The breakout failed.
While Nanning was stalled, Liuzhou sent an alarm: Wu Xuexian of the Northern Route Yunnan Army had taken Sanjiang and was besieging Liuzhou; its defender Li Shiyu had been killed at the front, and the city was about to fall. Li Zongren wired Bai Chongxi to come back from Guilin; Huang Shaohong shifted Wu Tingyang and Zhong Zupei from Nanning to Liuzhou. The Yunnan army fell back to Shatang and Shapu. Bai Chongxi deployed: Zhong Zupei on the left, Lin Zhufang in the centre, Wu Tingyang on the right, Lu Huanyan in reserve. It was a savage battle; Baima Mountain changed hands five times. In the end, attacked on three sides, the Yunnan line broke and retreated through Chang'an and Qingyuan, then by Donglan and Fengshan, and escaped home to Yunnan by way of Lingyun.
Inside Nanning, Long Yun heard that the main force at Liuzhou had collapsed. Epidemic disease was running through the city, food and ammunition were gone. On the night of July seventh, nineteen twenty-five, under cover of dark, he crossed the Zuo River with what was left and slipped back to Yunnan. Li Zongren sent Yu Zuobai after him; Yu moved half a beat too slowly, and Long Yun got away.
Seven months. Eighty thousand Yunnan troops. Not one of them swallowed Guangxi. Tang Jiyao's dream of being deputy marshal broke against the hills and rivers of Lingnan.
There is a footnote to the campaign. As the Yunnan army retreated, Tang Jiyao sat in one corner of Yunnan and lost because his command was tangled and every commander had his own plan: Long Yun and the Northern Route fought separate wars and obeyed no one. The New Guangxi Clique won cleanly; from then on no strong neighbour coveted the two Guang provinces, and they were free to take the olive branch Guangdong held out. Tang Jiyao never recovered from the defeat, and years later his own subordinates, Long Yun among them, forced him from power. That is a later story, and not for this episode.
While the northern battlefield was at full heat, a Zhili general named Feng Yuxiang quietly turned his guns around.
Feng Yuxiang, born eighteen eighty-two, from Chaoxian in Anhui. On October twenty-third he marched his army back to the capital, imprisoned Cao Kun in a single night and scattered the Zhili clique. That night is called the Jiazi Coup.
Cao Kun, the president who had bought his office, announced his retirement on November second. Wu Peifu heard the news at the front; his army dissolved and he fled south from Tanggu on a naval transport. Duan Qirui took over the government, and Zhang Zuolin rode into Beijing in state. Feng Yuxiang did one more thing that startled the country: on November fifth he drove Puyi, long since abdicated, out of the Forbidden City and abolished the Articles of Favourable Treatment for the Qing House. Even many who cursed the Beiyang system nodded at that.
That night has never had one agreed account. Feng said he could not stomach Cao Kun's bribery and Wu Peifu's monopoly of power, and wanted renewal. His enemies called it desertion and bad faith, and said he had been in secret understanding with Zhang Zuolin, Duan Qirui, and even Sun Yat-sen in the south.
The telegram that follows was issued by Feng Yuxiang, with Hu Jingyi, Sun Yue and others, on October twenty-third, nineteen twenty-four - the day he brought his army back to Beijing - and addressed to the whole country. Because the code word for that day in the telegraphic calendar was yang, later writers call it the Yang Telegram. Here it is, in English translation.
Armies are raised originally to defend against insult from abroad; for countrymen to slaughter one another is a shame before China and before the world. Unhappily, since the troubles of the ninth year, nameless campaigns have risen again and again; the sharper the quarrel, the deeper the wound to the nation's vitality. If those who govern had the slightest conscience, how should they have sought peace and given the people rest? Instead, trouble in the southeast spread to the northeast; the soldiers of the whole country were moved, and the bones of ten thousand people were dried up. Ask what they fight for, and for whom they fight: those who ordered it could hardly answer. We, Yu-xiang and the others, pace at midnight with no tears left to shed; driven by conscience, we take our stand for ending the war. Therefore on October twenty-third we resolved to bring our troops back, and with all the units under our command have formed the National Army of the Chinese Republic, sworn to be of use to the country and the people. If any still toy with war and bring calamity to our people and our country, this army, in order to shorten the war, will not shrink from meeting them in arms. The whole army has now reached the capital. Here the legations of all friendly powers are placed, and local order is of the first importance; we shall be responsible for maintaining it. As for all questions of political settlement, we ask the wise and able of the whole country to rise at once, to meet and devise a remedy, and to open together a new order. Perhaps it is from many hardships that a nation is strengthened. As we send this telegram we look up, and await your instruction.
One line after the reading: the telegram handed the question of the country's direction back to the wise and able of the whole nation. The sentence about where power lies is, we ask the wise and able of the whole country to rise at once and open together a new order; and its last line is, we await your instruction.
Two threads, and here they twist into one rope.
After the Jiazi Coup, Feng Yuxiang was the first to telegraph an invitation to Sun Yat-sen to come north and discuss the state of the nation; once Duan Qirui took office, he joined Feng and Zhang in a second joint invitation.
Sun left Guangdong on November thirteenth, nineteen twenty-four, travelling by way of Japan, and reached Beijing on December thirty-first. The proposals he publicly put forward were a national convention and the abolition of the unequal treaties. He was already seriously ill when he boarded; on arrival he entered Peking Union Medical College Hospital, and in February of the following year the diagnosis was liver cancer.
No one in the north took up those proposals. In February nineteen twenty-five Duan Qirui opened a separate Rehabilitation Conference and set the national convention aside. Feng Yuxiang, who had invited him, had by then lost power and withdrawn to Zhangjiakou. Zhang Zuolin talked to him about an entirely different arrangement. Three men, three calculations; the courtesy of the telegrams dissolved at the conference table.
On March twelfth, nineteen twenty-five, Sun Yat-sen died at his residence in Iron Lion Alley, Beijing, aged fifty-nine. His late disputes over the road ahead with Zhang Taiyan, Song Jiaoren, Huang Xing and Chen Jiongming are not judged here. Only the facts are laid out: the proposals were his, the conference was someone else's, and he died of illness in the north.
What follows is the Declaration on Going North, also called the Declaration on the Situation, issued by Sun Yat-sen on November tenth, nineteen twenty-four, before he set out - his own public account of what he intended by the journey. The phrase the eighteenth of September this year refers to September eighteenth of the thirteenth year of the republic. In English translation:
On the eighteenth of September this year, this party issued a declaration on the purpose of the northern expedition. Its central meaning was that the aim of the national revolution is to create an independent and free country, so as to protect the interests of the nation and the people. That aim is absolutely incompatible with the imperialist desire to keep China a colony forever. Thus in the revolution of nineteen eleven, though we overthrew the Manchu government, in no time the imperialists had joined with the warlords to oppose the national revolution, and did all they could to obstruct its aim. In thirteen years the warlords themselves have come and gone, but their nature and their function, from Yuan Shikai down to Cao Kun and Wu Peifu, have run in one and the same groove. Therefore the aim of the northern expedition is not merely to destroy Cao and Wu, but to ensure that after Cao and Wu are destroyed no men of the same kind rise again; in other words, it is not merely to overthrow the warlords, but to overthrow the imperialism on which the warlords live. Only so can the aim of the national revolution, its obstacles cleared, advance with vigour. The destiny of the people lies in the people's self-determination. If this party can win the aid of the people, then China's independence, freedom and unity will certainly be fully achieved through struggle. The aim of the national revolution is to create an independent and free country, so as to protect the interests of the nation and the people; its content was set out in the declaration of this party's first national congress. Taking the three principles of nationality, civil rights and livelihood as its base, and listing, according to the times, the remedies that are the minimum programme, in outline: in foreign policy, on one side, cancel all unequal treaties and privileges; on the other, change the nature of foreign debts so that the powers cannot use those debts to keep China in the position of a sub-colony. In domestic policy, define the powers of the centre and the provinces so that national unity and provincial self-government may each develop without obstructing the other; establish the county as the unit of self-government to lay deep the foundation of civil rights; and use all our strength to protect the freedom of the people, to assist the growth of agricultural, industrial and commercial bodies, and to seek improvement in the economy and in education. If the foreign policy is realised, the influence of imperialism in China will disappear and the country's independence and freedom will be secure; if the domestic policy is realised, the warlords cannot rise again from the ashes and the foundation of government by the people cannot be shaken. This, I dare believe, is a medicine suited to the present condition of China.
One line after the reading: the declaration handed the answer to where China goes to the self-determination of the people. The sentence about where power lies is, the destiny of the people lies in the people's self-determination; and the last line is, a medicine suited to the present condition of China.
The thread returns to the south. On July first, nineteen twenty-five, the Nationalist Government was established at Guangzhou, and the young soldiers trained at Whampoa got a proper name for the first time: the National Revolutionary Army.
Whampoa Military Academy had opened in June nineteen twenty-four on Changzhou Island at Guangzhou, with Chiang Kai-shek as commandant; Zhou Enlai, Ye Jianying and Nie Rongzhen taught there in turn, and a Russian adviser, General Galen, helped train the troops. The first class was about five hundred men; they graduated that winter and went straight into the Eastern Expeditions, which drove Chen Jiongming out of Guangdong. Those men were the backbone of the new National Revolutionary Army.
From that day the south was no longer a slogan. It had a real army - and that army's general headquarters stood in Guangzhou.
The story comes to July of nineteen twenty-six. On July sixth the General Headquarters of the National Revolutionary Army was set up and Chiang Kai-shek became commander-in-chief. Three days later, on July ninth, the banners covered the sky at the East Parade Ground in Guangzhou.
Three years since Cao Kun bought the chair with silver. Two years since Feng Yuxiang changed the board in Beijing in a single night. The old account in the north had turned to its last page; the army in the south stood on its starting line.
What came after that day belongs to the next episode. Here, remember only one date: July ninth, nineteen twenty-six.
Two threads, written as one. In those three years the north changed hands: Cao Kun fell, Zhang Zuolin entered Beijing. The south found its strength: Guangxi was squeezed into a fist, Guangzhou assembled an army. In the very same year, nineteen twenty-four, one side was changing its government and the other side was building one. Old actors left, new actors came on, and between them lay countless lives and accounts that will never be settled. Which side was cleaner, which side muddier, this narration will not decide. One thing can be said plainly: in the Beiyang years the newspapers could curse the president and the man would still go to the opera; the universities made room for left and right, new and old alike. That looseness was not seen again for many years to come.
We can still stand on the traces of that history today. At Zhengyangmen in Beijing, the troops entering and leaving the city in the republican years passed under the arrow tower; at the Shenwumen gate of the Forbidden City, Puyi was escorted out of the palace in the thirteenth year of the republic. On Changzhou Island at Whampoa, the parade ground and the two-storey walkways of the old academy still stand, now open to visitors as a national key cultural relic. Around the East Parade Ground, in today's Yuexiu district near the Martyrs' Park, you can still find the ground where the oath was taken. In Guilin, the Jingjiang Princes' Palace and Solitary Beauty Peak looked down on Shen Hongying's siege of the city; outside Nanning, Kunlun Pass still holds the terrain of that bloody fight in the fourteenth year of the republic. These places say nothing, yet they are more honest than any textbook. This history was not invented; it is solid ground beneath your feet.
In Beijing the rules lay broken: if a president could be bought, did the law still count? Yet the teahouses in the lanes stayed open and the storytellers kept telling, and the old Beijing saying went, under the Son of Heaven the rules are strict - only now the Son of Heaven had bought the job himself, and the rules grew strangely light. In Guangxi the mountains bred a hard temper: a bowl of rice noodles, a jar of pickled bamboo shoots, and people who kept their word in a bargain and kept it in a fight. In Guangdong, morning tea talked over the fate of the country, and remittances from overseas kept whole families alive; people there had long since learned to look outward. The true face of an age is often not in telegrams and declarations, but in the bowl, the teacup, the stage. Histories usually leave that out. We put it back.
The Beiyang government was broke: owing more than a hundred million in military arrears, its taxes long since scraped clean by the warlords. Cao Kun's silver dollars were only robbing one wall to patch another. The more notes it printed the less they were worth; when the soldiers' pay did not arrive, mutinies followed, again and again. At the other end, Guangxi's tin and rice, Guangdong's silk and overseas remittances, came in as real money. Who could feed so many armies, so many mouths? Not the chair in Beijing, but the mines of the south, the rice in the fields, the remittances from across the sea. The north fed its armies with a printing press and grew hollower with every campaign; the south made blood from industry and remittances and grew stronger with every fight. An army with an empty stomach, however well it fights, does not march far.
After his abdication Cao Kun lived in Tianjin and died there in nineteen thirty-eight, never touching power again. Wu Peifu fled south, never recovered, and died in Beiping in nineteen thirty-nine. Tang Jiyao was forced from power by his own subordinates in the sixteenth year of the republic and died a disappointed man in the twentieth. Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, the twin stars of Guangxi, were only just rising; their story belongs to later episodes, not this one. Three old marshals down on their luck - one in retirement, one in ruin, one in bitterness; two young men from Guangxi stepping onto the stage. Who among them was a good man, who a bad one, I will not answer. Cao Kun was greedy yet not without kindness; Wu Peifu was proud yet had backbone; Tang Jiyao failed, yet he had once had ambitions. I only set them inside the board of their own time. You decide what you see.
One chair with a price tag collapsed. Another chair still stands empty.
The president who bought his office has gone, the general who changed sides has gone, the statesman who travelled north has gone, and the oath at Guangzhou has been sworn. The old actors are leaving; the new ones are at the door.
The Beiyang curtain has fallen. But what follows - celebration, or a longer and harder disorder? That is the story of our next episode.