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.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1894–1895Served as a cavalryman in the Qing army during the First Sino-Japanese War
- 1905Commanded a regiment organized into the regular army of Fengtian
- 1916Military governor of Fengtian
- 1918Inspector general of the Three Eastern Provinces, consolidating control of Manchuria
- 1924Controlled Beijing as military dictator of the Republic of China
- 1927–1928Generalissimo of the Republic of China
- 1928Assassinated by Kwantung Army officers in the Huanggutun Incident
Related historical events
- 1911–1916The 1911 Revolution and the birth of the RepublicManchurian strongman who consolidated during the revolutionBuilt his power in Fengtian by suppressing the revolutionaries there, becoming the Fengtian warlord.
- 1924–1927The first united front, the Northern Expedition and the catastrophe of 1927Warlord of Beijing who raided the Soviet embassyRaided the Soviet embassy in April 1927 and executed Li Dazhao.
- 1938–1941The Soviet-Japanese Border Wars and the Neutrality PactManchurian warlord, victim of the Huanggutun IncidentAssassinated by the Kwantung Army in the Huanggutun Incident, a direct precursor to the Mukden Incident.
Seizing Beijing and the anti-communist turn, 1926-1928
In April 1926 the Fengtian clique took Beijing, and in December Zhang became commander-in-chief of the National Pacification Army, carrying his power beyond Manchuria into North China. Named for the Grand Marshal post by the provincial warlords on 16 June 1927, he was installed two days later, on 18 June, as Grand Marshal of the Army and Navy of the Republic of China at the Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai. He thereby exercised the powers of the presidency and became the last head of state of the Beiyang government.
In this period he drove the confrontation with the Kuomintang and the Communist Party into an openly anti-communist programme. Casting Feng Yuxiang and Chiang Kai-shek as 'cunning ambitious bandits,' he argued that the Soviet Union and the Comintern were using the First United Front to 'Sovietize' China. On 6 April 1927 some 300 military police and gendarmes entered the legation quarter at Dongjiaomin Xiang and searched the Far Eastern Bank, the Chinese Eastern Railway office and the Boxer Indemnity Commission premises adjoining the Soviet embassy. The embassy's main building was only surrounded, not entered, yet Soviet diplomatic and commercial staff were arrested and documents seized in large quantities. Li Dazhao, a former Peking University librarian and co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party who had taken refuge there, was arrested along with left-wing Kuomintang figures.
On 28 April a military tribunal sentenced Li and nineteen others to death, and they were hanged that day. In a proclamation Zhang stated that they were 'Red Party' members who had spread communism, disturbed public order and sought to overthrow the government. The raid brought a Soviet protest and the recall of embassy personnel, and the forced search of a legation quarter covered by extraterritoriality drew objections from the foreign legations, unsettling the Beijing government's international position. The seized documents were published as evidence of Soviet subversion. The executions effectively ended Kuomintang-Communist cooperation in Beijing.
The anti-communist line was entangled with the Manchurian question. Zhang was wary of Soviet penetration in the northeast but avoided a showdown over the Chinese Eastern Railway, and after 1924 the Soviets re-established their dominance over the line. In February 1927 his forces seized the Soviet merchant steamer Pamyat Lenina on the Yangtze, arresting its crew and two diplomatic couriers, and on 9 April 1927, with French permission, his police searched Soviet institutions in the Tianjin French concession. The Nanjing Nationalist government's declaration of a break with the Soviet Union in December 1927 emerged from the same confrontation. As the Northern Expedition pressed in, Zhang appealed on 9 May 1928 for a north-south truce against foreign encroachment, and on 2 June he announced his withdrawal, handing central administration to the State Council and military command to his army group commanders. Three days later the bomb exploded at Huanggutun.