Activities and affiliations

Military command Beiyang government and warlords 1859–1916 ○ Illness

The Beiyang strongman who took over the 1911 revolution and tried to make himself emperor

Recalled after the 1911 Wuchang Uprising, he pressed both the Qing court and the revolutionaries, winning the emperor's abdication and the provisional presidency in 1912. He proclaimed a monarchy in December 1915, abdicated in March 1916, and died that June.

A soldier-official who built the Beiyang New Army in the late Qing. When the 1911 revolution broke out he pressed both the court and the revolutionaries, securing the Qing emperor’s abdication and his own installation as provisional president of the Republic in 1912. He then hollowed out parliament, dissolved the Kuomintang and, in late 1915, proclaimed himself emperor; provincial revolts forced him to cancel the monarchy in 1916, and he died months later. His death fractured the Beiyang army and opened the warlord era.

Military command Beiyang government and warlords 1875–1928 ✕ Assassinated

The warlord who dominated Manchuria

On June 4, 1928, the train carrying him from Beijing exploded at Huanggutun.

Zhang Zuolin rose from a late Qing soldier to the autonomous military ruler of Manchuria and one of the central figures of China's Warlord Era. Leading the Fengtian clique, he combined coercive military power with fiscal and industrial development to consolidate a regional state and later projected power into North China. His accommodation with Japan brought weapons and economic concessions, but also left him exposed to officers who wanted direct Japanese control of Manchuria. Retreating from Beijing after the Nationalist Northern Expedition, he was fatally wounded by a bomb planted by Kwantung Army officers in the Huanggutun Incident, a major precursor to Japan's wider military escalation in Manchuria.

Military command Beiyang government and warlords 1901–2001 ↓ Arrested 1936 · natural causes

The “Young Marshal” who detained Chiang Kai-shek at Xi’an and opened the way to the second united front

In December 1936 he detained Chiang Kai-shek at Xi'an, forcing the Second United Front against Japan, and paid for it with more than fifty years under house arrest.

Son of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, he inherited the Northeast when the Japanese killed his father in 1928 and pledged allegiance to Nanjing that year. Driven from Manchuria in 1931, he was sent against the Communists, but in December 1936 he and Yang Hucheng seized Chiang Kai-shek at Xi’an to demand an end to civil war and resistance to Japan. Zhou Enlai brokered the release; Zhang flew back with Chiang and spent more than fifty years under house arrest. Freed in the 1990s, he died in Hawaii at 100.