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Why was Sun Yat-sen convinced that both the southern and northern warlords were as bad as each other, and that a revolutionary party must have its own army? |
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See answer below. |
Xu Chongzhi studied at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in Japan. In 1906, he entered the anti-Qing revolution as a member of the United League (同盟會). In 1913, he participated in the Second Revolution (二次革命), then joined the Chinese Revolutionary Party led by Sun Yat-sen in the following year. He was a participant in the 1915 National Protection War (護國戰爭) against Yuan Shikai (袁世凱), and a supporter of Sun’s 1917 Constitutional Protection Movement (護法運動). When Sun served as Extraordinary President of the Republic of China in Guangzhou between 1921 and 1922, he staunchly supported Sun’s idea of uniting the country by force. Chen Jiongming launched a coup in 1922, Xu fought against Chen in the following year. In 1925, he assaulted Chen again on Sun’s order and crushed his main force. In 1939, he moved to Hong Kong. During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in 1941, he was detained by the Japanese, who forced him to support the Japanese puppet government headed by Wang Jingwei (汪精衛). However, Xu would rather die to follow, and eventually smuggled himself to Macao. In 1965, he passed away from illness in Hong Kong.
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Why was Sun Yat-sen convinced that both the southern and northern warlords were as bad as each other, and that a revolutionary party must have its own army? |
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Sun recognised the need for an army in support of the revolution. Before the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, he planned and led no less than 10 anti-Qing armed uprisings, and was well aware that a mutiny by his revolutionary comrades within the Chinese New Army had made the Wuchang Uprising (武昌起義) possible. After the birth of the Republic, the fact that the revolutionaries lacked sufficient military power forced them to cede the presidency to Yuan Shikai and later cost them the Second Revolution. While Yuan’s downfall at the hands of the National Protection Army was a stroke of luck, the Beiyang clique remained in power, and its continual efforts to undo whatever the revolution had achieved called for a war to protect the Constitution. Although Sun was made the Generalissimo in Guangzhou during the Constitutional Protection Movement, the warlords of south-eastern China did not actually identify with the Constitution. Once they had secured their power and domains, they colluded with the Beiyang clique to undermine the Constitutional Protection Movement. Against Sun’s orders, they implemented peace negotiations and declared a truce with their opponents in the North. Later, they also sidelined Sun by forming a separate centre of power called the “Alliance of Provinces to Constitutional Protection of the Republic of China (中華民國護法各省聯合會)”. Sun lacked substantial military support within the Guangzhou Junta, and eventually reached a point when his orders were ineffective beyond the Generalissmo’s Mansion. By early 1918, the Yunnan clique (滇系) styled itself the commander-in-chief of the eight-province alliance formed by Sichuan (四川), Yunnan (雲南), Guizhou (貴州), Hubei (湖北), Henan (河南), Shaanxi (陝西), Hunan (湖南), and Fujian (福建). On 4 May of the same year, the embittered Sun resigned to the Extraordinary Parliament. In a telegram, he revealed the south-western military cliques’ plans to sabotage the Constitutional Protection Movement and sombrely informed the Chinese people, “There is no greater scourge on our country than these power struggles between military men. The southern and northern warlords are as bad as each other.” The Constitutional Protection Movement gradually drifted into irrelevance afterwards. In 1921, with support from the Guangdong army commander Chen Jiongming, Sun set up a government in Guangzhou and took up office as Extraordinary President. However, Chen’s coup in 1922 derailed Sun’s revolutionary plans again. After all these setbacks, Sun became convinced that a revolutionary party could not depend on warlord cliques but its own army. |