warlord, independent military commander in China in the early and mid-20th century. Warlords ruled various parts of the country following the death of Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), who had served as the first president of the Republic of China from 1912 to 1916. Yuan’s power had come from his position as head of the Beiyang Army, which was the only major modern military force in China at the time. His conduct of the government through a reliance upon military power rather than parliamentary methods made him the “father of the warlords”; at least 10 of the major warlords that came to power in the 1920s had originally served as officers in his Beiyang Army. The other warlords achieved power by backing either of various provincial military interests or foreign powers, most notably Japan.
New factions and alliances constantly ensured that no one warlord ever became powerful enough to destroy all the rest. As a result, few warlords were able to extend their power over more than one or two provinces. Nevertheless, a major cleavage developed between warlord groups after Yuan’s death.
One group, the Anhui (or Wan) Clique, was founded by Duan Qirui, who served as premier of the Republic of China just after Yuan’s death and suppressed an attempt to restore the former Qing emperor Puyi in 1917. A second group was the Zhili (or Zhi) Clique, which was headed by Feng Guozhang, Cao Kun, and, later, Wu Peifu, the latter a traditionally educated former Beiyang officer who tried to establish order in central China. A third major group was the Fengtian (or Feng) Clique, which was controlled by Zhang Zuolin, a former warlord based in Manchuria (now Northeast China) who, with Japanese support, came to control that region’s provinces. During the 1920s these groups were constantly fighting with each other for control of more territory and for more influential government positions.
Meanwhile, in the south, Sun Yat-sen, who had established an independent revolutionary regime under the control of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), received aid from the small Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union to build the Republican army, through which the Nationalists consolidated their control in the South. Sun died in 1925, but the next year Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) swept northward and in 1928 reunified China, abolishing the separate warlord regimes. Chiang, however, did not really eliminate the warlords, but rather, by means of alliances, incorporated many of them into his army. Local warlords continued to exert de facto power over their own domains and to be a factor in Chinese politics until the establishment of the communist government in 1949.