Duan Qirui

Early Years and the Beiyang Army

Duan Qirui, a native of Hefei in Anhui and known as “Duan Hefei,” was born in 1865. According to the 1916 Japanese China Yearbook, after graduating from the Beiyang Military Academy he spent a year of further training at the Krupp works in Germany. When Yuan Shikai trained the New Army at Xiaozhan in the late Qing, Duan served under him and rose to division commander. Yuan’s most trusted generals were Wang Shizhen, Duan Qirui and Feng Guozhang, known at the time as the dragon, the tiger and the dog.

The 1911 Revolution and the Yuan Shikai Years

During the 1911 Revolution Duan commanded the First Corps. On 26 January 1912 he and more than forty Beiyang generals telegraphed the cabinet and the princes urging the immediate establishment of a republic, helping to bring about the Qing abdication. Under the Republic he served as Yuan’s minister of the army and was acting premier from 1 May to 31 July 1913. When Yuan prepared his monarchy Duan and Xu Shichang resigned in disapproval; after Yuan cancelled the monarchy in March 1916 Duan was named chief of the general staff and, from 22 April, secretary of state.

The President–Cabinet Conflict, the Punitive Campaign and the War

After Yuan’s death Duan became premier on 29 June 1916, clashing repeatedly with President Li Yuanhong over entry into the First World War until he was dismissed in late May 1917. When Zhang Xun restored the Qing, Duan took command of the punitive army at Machang near Tianjin on 3 July; his forces entered Beijing on 12 July, he became premier again on 17 July, and his cabinet then decided to declare war on Germany. Admirers credit him with “three restorations of the Republic”—the Qing abdication in 1912, his premiership after the monarchy’s cancellation in 1916 and the defeat of Zhang Xun in 1917. The historian Zhang Ming argues that only the third deserves the name, and even that pitted more than sixty thousand Japanese-backed troops against two thousand queued soldiers.

Xue Guanlan, Yuan Shikai’s son-in-law, summarised Duan’s policies in power as unification by force; war-participation loans to build up his army; the Sino-Japanese Joint Defence Agreement; and the use of the provisional senate to write a new parliamentary law and manipulate elections so that the Anfu Club dominated the new parliament, which made Xu Shichang president. Between 1917 and 1918 loans arranged through the Japanese intermediary Nishihara Kamezō amounted to ¥145 million. Duan served a third term as premier from 23 March to 10 October 1918. Zhang Ming judges that Duan’s greatest mistake was launching a war against the south, pouring Japanese loans into unification by force and alienating Wu Peifu through unfair rewards, which ultimately split the Beiyang camp.

The Zhili–Anhui War and the Provisional Chief Executive

Diplomatic failure at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 set off student protests. In July 1920 the Zhili clique under Cao Kun, backed by Zhang Zuolin of the Fengtian clique, defeated Duan’s Anhui clique and he retired. After Feng Yuxiang’s Beijing coup of 1924, Duan became Provisional Chief Executive of the Republic on 24 November. According to Xue Guanlan, he was at Feng’s mercy in this period: Feng’s side killed Duan’s confidant Xu Shuzheng and surrounded his office, from which Duan barely escaped. On 18 March 1926 guards at his office opened fire on petitioners; Lu Xun wrote that several hundred were killed or wounded, among them the women’s normal university students Liu Hezhen and Yang Dequn. Whether Duan ordered the shooting remains disputed; Zhang Ming holds that he did not, but that the story that he afterwards knelt in penance is also untrue. He was forced from office on 20 April 1926.

Final Years

Duan retired to the Japanese concession in Tianjin, took the Buddhist name “Layman of the Right Path,” and devoted himself to Buddhism and to the game of go, sponsoring the players Gu Shuiru and Wu Qingyuan to study in Japan. After the Mukden Incident, Japanese agents repeatedly tried to recruit him to head a north China regime; he refused to deal with them. In January 1933 he accepted Chiang Kai-shek’s invitation to leave Tianjin for Shanghai, telling reporters that if the whole country prepared and acted together, it need not fear even ten Japans. He died in Shanghai on 2 November 1936, his final words including an exhortation not to neglect national defence.

Assessments of Duan remain divided. He accumulated no wealth or property and is seen by some as unusually clean among the Beiyang generals; Zhang Ming counters that his household expenses were paid from public funds and that, while not enriching himself, he did nothing to stop subordinates from doing so and indulged favourites such as Xu Shuzheng.