ABSTRACT
The warlord period of Chinese history is normally seen to encompass the years from 1916, the death of Yuan Shikai, to 1928, the completion of the Northern Expedition that claimed to have finally unified the country under a new Nationalist Party (Guomindang) government based in Nanjing. Even at the time, though, it was generally recognized that the Northern Expedition—or the broader Nationalist Revolution this military campaign was meant to initiate—had not, in fact, achieved its putative goal of the elimination of warlordism. While defeating many prominent warlords, ultimately the Northern Expedition only achieved its military “success” by incorporating large numbers of warlord armies under the Nationalist Party banner. The armies of these “warlord converts,” as Diana Lary calls them, made up the bulk of the revolutionary forces to emerge from the Northern Expedition. 1 This process of incorporation, however, left largely intact the autonomous power of many warlord commanders who still held sway over large sections of the country. James Sheridan coined the term “residual warlordism” to describe the anomalous situation of the survival of powerful regional military commanders despite the supposed unification of the country under the Nationalist party-state. 2
