Beiyang Army
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The Beiyang Army (北洋軍 běiyáng-jūn) was a powerful and Western-appearing Chinese military force created by the Qing dynasty government in the late 19th century. It was the centrepiece of a general reconstruction of China's military system. The Beiyang Army played a major role in Chinese politics for at least three decades and arguably right up to 1949. It made the 1911 revolution possible, and by dividing into warlord factions (北洋軍閥 běiyáng jūnfá) ushered in a period of regional division.
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Origins under Li Hongzhang (to 1900)
The Beiyang Army was created from Li Hongzhang's Anhui Army, which first saw action during the Taiping Rebellion. Unlike the traditional Green Standard or Banner forces of the Qing, the Anhui Army was largely a militia army based on personal, rather than institutional, loyalties. The Anhui Army was at first equipped with a mixture of traditional and modern weapons. Its creator, Li Hongzhang, used the customs and tax revenues of the five provinces under his control in the 1880s and 1890s to modernize segments of the Anhui Army, and to build a modern navy (the Beiyang Fleet). It is around this time that the term "Beiyang Army" began to be used to refer to the military forces under his control. The term "Beiyang", meaning literally "Northern Ocean", refers to the customs revenues collected in North China, which were used first to fund the Beiyang Fleet and later the Beiyang Army. Unfortunately, funding was usually irregular and training by no means systematic.
By the mid-1890s the Beiyang Army was the best regionalist troops China could field. The Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) was fought almost entirely by the Beiyang Army, unsupported by the forces of other provinces. In the war the Beiyang Fleet, which included two pre-Dreadnought battleships, was overwhelmed by the well-served quick-firing guns of a lighter Japanese fleet. On land similarly Japan's German-inspired conscript army, led by academy-trained professional officers, defeated the Beiyang Army.
Yuan Shikai's ascendancy (1901-1908)
Li Hongzhang died in 1901 and was replaced by Yuan Shikai, who took on Li's appointment as Governor-General of Zhili and as Superintendent of Trade for the Northern Ocean (北洋大臣). Yuan had been given command in 1895 of the brigade-sized New Created Army. Many of his officers later became leading figures of the warlord period. They included Zhang Xun (who attempted to restore the Qing dynasty in 1917), Xu Shichang (President of the Republic of China 1918-22), Cao Kun (President 1922-24 and leader of the Zhili military clique), Duan Qirui ("Prime Minister" during much of 1916-20 and leader of the Anhui military clique) and Feng Guochang (President 1917-18 and founder of the Zhili clique).
Yuan Shikai oversaw the piecemeal reform of Qing military institutions after 1901. He founded the Baoting Military Academy, which allowed him to expand the Beiyang Army. With the creation of the Commission for Army Reorganisation in December 1903, the Beiyang Army became the model on which the military forces of other provinces should be standardized. By 1905 Yuan had increased the Beiyang Army to six divisions. In October he held manoeuvres near Hejian in central Zhili using the newly completed Beijing-Hankou railway. Similar exercises where held the next year with Zhang Zhidong's army in Hubei. It was the unanimous opinion of foreign observers that the Beiyang Army was the largest, best equipped and best trained military force in China at the time.
The Beiyang Army under Manchu control (1909-1910)
The Empress Dowager Cixi died on 15 November 1908 and was succeeded by the three year old Puyi. The new regent, 2nd Prince Chun (醇親王), had Yuan Shikai dismissed the next year. Yuan bided his time in retirement, carefully maintaining his network of personal contacts in the Beiyang Army. At the time of the 1911 Revolution, command of the Beiyang Army was supposedly in the hands of the Manchu minister Yinchang. In reality Yuan Shikai still had the ability to manipulate it due to the loyalties of its officer to him personally. Four divisions were located in Zhili, the 3rd Division being in Manchuria and the 5th Division in Shandong. Almost all the officers were ethnically Chinese, many of whom were returned students from Japan. Armament was not standardized, but was better in that respect than either before or later. Most of the infantry wre armed with either the standard 1896 Japanese rifle or the Mauser 7.9mm.
The 1911 Revolution
The events of the revolution demonstrated that the Beiyang Army, which formed the core of the 36-division New Army, was absolutely the dominant military force within China. Controlling the fragmented loyalties of its formations was the key to political power in post-1911 China. The insurrection which actually set off the 1911 Revolution took place in Wuchang on 10 October. On 12 October Yinchang was ordered to take two Beiyang Army divisions down the Beijing-Hankou Railway to suppress the uprising at Wuchang. He attacked the revolutionary army commanded by Huang Xing on 27 October.
Covered by their own field artillery and the guns of the imperial fleet, the Beiyang infantry attacked with a cloud of skirmishers followed by a line of close order company fronts. These textbook tactics were soon to be discredited in the intense fighting of the First World War, but against an undisciplined revolutionary with no machine guns, they worked perfectly.
On the same day Yuan Shikai was ordered to take command of the forces at Wuchang. He refused, instead securing high commands for his two most trusted associates, Feng Guochang and Duan Qirui. Fighting continued in Hubei for another month as Yuan negotiated with the dynasty and the revolutionaries using the Beiyang Army as weapon of coercion. The end result was that he was elected as provisional President of the Republic of China.
Beiyang clique in power (1911-15)
During the period 1911-15 Yuan Shikai remained the only man who could hold the Beiyang Army together. He and his followers strongly resisted any attempt by the Kuomintang (KMT) to insert outsiders into their chain of command. They negotiated a £25 million (sterling) loan from a five-power banking consortium to support the Beiyang Army despite the uproar from the KMT. In 1913 Yuan Shikai appointed four of his loyal lieutenants as military governors in southern provinces: Duan Qirui in Anhui, Feng Guochang in Jiangsu, Li Shun in Jiangxi and Tang Xiangming in Hunan. The unified Beiyang military clique now attained its maximum extent of territorial control. It exercised firm control over North China and the Yangtze River provinces. Throughout 1914, it supported Yuan in making revisions to the constitution to give himself treaty- and war-making power as well as substantial emergency powers.
In December 1915 Yuan declared himself Emperor. This was opposed by almost all the generals and officers of the Beiyang Army, from Duan Qirui and Feng Guochang down. More importantly, many outlying provinces such as Yunnan openly opposed him. Yuan Shikai was forced to back down from his imperial designs. Both Duan and Feng refused to support Yuan in power any further and in the end the only prominent Beiyang general to remain loyal was the irrepressible Zhang Xun. Yuan died soon afterward. After Yuan Shikai's death the Beiyang Army split into cliques led by Yuan's principal proteges. Duan Qirui's Anhui clique and the Zhili clique founded by Feng Guochang, but led after Feng's death by Cao Kun and Wu Peifu, were the principal Beiyang cliques. Disunited, the power of the Beiyang Army was challenged by provincial armies such as Yan Xishan's forces in Shaanxi and Zhang Zuolin's Fengtian clique.
Fragmentation of the Beiyang army (1916-18)
Pressure from the Beiyang commanders prevented any political figure of the left from taking up power in the Republic of China government. For almost a decade after Yuan's death, the agenda of the leading Beiyang warlords was to reunify China by first reuniting the Beiyang Army and then conquering the lesser provincial armies.
For a period from mid-1916, the ultraconservative Beiyang general Zhang Xun managed to maintain the unity of the army via collegial contacts and negotiation. Like Yuan Shikai had done, the Beiyang generals used their military power to intimidate the parliament into passing the legislation they wanted. Following a dispute with President Li Yuanhong over a loan from Japan in early 1917, Duan Qirui declared independence from the government along with most of the other Beiyang generals. Zhang Xun then occupied Beijing with his army, and on 1 July shocked the Chinese political world by proclaiming the restoration of the Qing dynasty. All the other generals condemned this and the restoration soon collapsed. The elimination of Zhang Xun soon afterwards destroyed the balance of power between the rival factions of Feng and Duan and inaugurated a decade of high warlordism.
Feng Guochang went to Beijing to assume the presidency after securing the appointment of his protege as military commander in Jiangxi, Hubei and Jiangsu. These three provinces became the bases of strength of the Zhili military clique. Duan Qirui resumed his position of Prime Minister; his Anhui (sometimes called Anfu) clique dominated the Beijing area. Using Japanese funding to build up his so-called "War Participation Army", Duan continued to struggle with Feng Guochang.
Feng was eventually eliminated from political life in 1918, when Xu Shichang, the Beiyang elder statesman, became President. His deputy Cao Kun replaced him as leader of the Zhili clique. At the end of World War I, Duan dominated the Chinese representation at the Treaty of Versailles and used the Shanghai peace conference in 1919 to bring pressure on the non-Beiyang militarists supporting Sun Yat-sen's government in Guangzhou. He continued to receive Japanese funding for his army (renamed "National Defence Army"), for which he was willing to grant Japan legal succession to the German rights in Shandong (see May Fourth Movement).
High warlordism (1919-1925)
Before May-June 1919, some combination of fighting and negotiation among the major Beiyang leader was expected to lead to military unification, which in turn would permit the retoration of the constitutional political processes that Yuan Shikai had disrupted. By 1919 the three major northern military factions had cemented, two of them - Anhui and Zhili - directly from the Beiyang Army and the third - Fengtian, under Zhang Zuolin - from an amalgamation of Beiyang and local troops. They and their imitators on a smaller scale were willing to get money and arms from any source in order to survive and the weaker factions would combine against the stronger.
The history of the major warlord wars down to 1925 recount the failure of any of the military commanders in China to centralise political and military power to any degree. In a situation resembling the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, most of South China remained beyond Beiyang control, to become the incubator for both the KMT and Communist Party of China movements.