Li Yuanhong

Origins and the Late-Qing New Army

Li Yuanhong, courtesy name Songqing, was born in 1864 in Huangpi, Hubei. According to an article by Yu Shicun published in Global People, he came from a poor family; his father, Li Chaoxiang, went to Tianjin to enlist as a soldier, and in 1883, at nineteen, Li entered the Beiyang Naval Academy in Tianjin, where Yan Fu and Sa Zhenbing were among his teachers. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 his ship was sunk; he jumped into the sea and survived because he was wearing a life jacket.

He then joined Zhang Zhidong. According to an article published by The Paper, he spoke fluent English, and when Zhang was acting viceroy of Liangjiang he appointed Li English interpreter to the Self-Strengthening Army; after Zhang returned to the Huguang viceroyalty, Li helped manage the four textile bureaus, the Hanyang Iron Works and the arsenal, and he made three study tours of Japan in the late Qing. Japanese reference works record that he trained the New Army in Hubei and rose to command a mixed brigade; the Nipponica encyclopedia adds that within the New Army he repeatedly suppressed the activities of Hubei revolutionaries.

The Wuchang Uprising and the “First Military Governor”

When the Wuchang Uprising broke out on 10 October 1911, the revolutionaries’ main leaders, Huang Xing and Song Jiaoren, were not in Wuhan. According to a Changjiang Daily report carried by China News Service, citing A Concise History of Wuhan edited by Pi Mingxiu, the revolutionaries had discussed the choice of military governor several times before the uprising without reaching a decision; after their success someone proposed Li Yuanhong instead, and he had already been nominated in the earlier discussions. Yu Shicun writes that Li at first hid in the home of his subordinate Liu Wenji, and the revolutionaries who tracked him down urged him to come out and take charge; on 13 October he agreed to become military governor and, at their urging, cut off his queue. When the Qing sent Sa Zhenbing with a fleet, Li wrote to his old teacher asking who among them lacked courage and sincerity, who was not a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, and who would be willing to serve as a slave of the Manchus and slaughter his own compatriots. Japanese reference works also differ over how he became military governor, some saying he was put forward by the revolutionaries and others that he was forced to join them. When the Nanjing Provisional Government was founded in January 1912, he was elected vice-president.

The widely repeated story that he was dragged out from under a bed during the uprising, earning him the nickname of the military governor under the bed, has been questioned. According to the same Changjiang Daily report, citing the research of the writer Pei Gaocai, it originated after the killing of Zhang Zhenwu in 1912, when Cai Jiou, chief writer of the Wuhan newspaper Zhendan Minbao, published an editorial accusing Li of hiding under his bed during the uprising and the paper then ran a satirical story, after which the nickname spread. The Paper calls the story a mistaken account and notes that some Nationalists played a part in creating and spreading it; Yu Shicun likewise considers it without factual basis.

Vice-President and the Second Revolution

In August 1912 Zhang Zhenwu, deputy head of military affairs in the Hubei military government and a leader of the Wuchang Uprising, was killed in Beijing. Yu Shicun calls this a joint plot by Li and Yuan Shikai and the act for which Li has been most criticised. When Huang Xing telegraphed to demand an explanation, Li replied with a list of Zhang’s crimes, saying that one should secure the Republic rather than protect an individual. According to Japanese reference works, in 1913 he became chairman of the Progressive Party, assisting Yuan and opposing the Nationalists.

After the assassination of Song Jiaoren, the historian Feng Tianyu writes, Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing sent emissaries urging Li at least to remain neutral, but he held that without Yuan there would be chaos and declared his firm support for Yuan. In May 1913 he broke up the Improvement Society that Hubei revolutionaries had formed to overthrow both Li and Yuan, and on 25 June he suppressed an uprising in Wuchang; he helped the Beiyang army encircle the anti-Yuan forces in Jiangxi and handed the Hanyang Arsenal over to the War Ministry of Yuan’s government. Citing reports in the Shanghai newspaper Shibao, Feng writes that by early September at least three hundred revolutionaries had been executed on his orders.

Once the Second Revolution was put down, Yuan was unwilling to leave Li, who was not of the Beiyang clique, in command of troops in Hubei. According to Feng, Duan Qirui arrived in Hankou on 8 December 1913 to “invite” Li to the capital and the next day hurried him onto a special train north; on the 10th Beijing issued an order appointing Duan acting military governor of Hubei. In Beijing Li was lodged on Yingtai island in the Southern Lake (Zhongnanhai) and thereafter held only nominal office, without command of troops. In 1914, when Yuan created the Council of State, he appointed Li its president. Yu Shicun writes that to win Li over, Yuan had his ninth son marry Li’s daughter. During Yuan’s monarchical attempt, according to Yu, Li resisted passively by resigning; the Nationalist government’s commendation of 1928 says that when Yuan usurped the title of emperor, Li refused to bend to inducements or threats.

First Presidency and the Conflict with Duan Qirui

After Yuan’s death in June 1916, Li succeeded him as president, with Duan Qirui as premier. The two clashed repeatedly over entering the war against Germany and other matters. Yu Shicun recounts that Duan’s cabinet secretary Xu Shuzheng once told Li impatiently that the president should simply stamp the seal next to the date on the last page without asking what was in front. According to telegrams from the American minister Paul Reinsch, in late May 1917, with the president and Parliament holding out strongly against the premier and nearly all ministers having resigned, Li issued a mandate relieving Duan and appointing Wu Tingfang acting premier.

Zhang Xun then brought his troops into Beijing as a mediator, and on 13 June Li was prevailed upon to sign a mandate dissolving Parliament. When Zhang restored Puyi on 1 July and demanded that Li give way, Li refused to cooperate with the restoration, took refuge in the Japanese legation and sent word expressing the hope that the United States would not recognise the restoration. Yu Shicun writes that Li telegraphed Vice-President Feng Guozhang in Nanjing asking him to act as president and reappointed Duan Qirui as premier to suppress Zhang Xun. After the restoration collapsed, Feng came to Beijing as acting president, and Li did not return to office.

Second Presidency and Forced Departure

After the first Zhili–Fengtian War of 1922, the Zhili clique brought him back. According to telegrams from the American minister Jacob Gould Schurman, President Xu Shichang resigned and left Beijing on 2 June; Wu Peifu, Cao Kun and other Zhili leaders publicly favoured Li’s return, and a group of members of the old Parliament meeting in Tianjin urged him as lawful president to complete his term; Li replied that he would resume office if Wu and Cao agreed to the disbandment of troops and the abolition of the post of military governor everywhere. He arrived in Beijing on 11 June, temporarily assumed the duties of president and named W. W. Yen acting premier.

On 6 June 1923 the entire cabinet resigned. Schurman reported that behind all the other reasons was the plan of Cao Kun’s followers to force Li out of the presidency and put Cao in his place. On 9 June the Beijing police stopped work; an informant friendly to the president told Schurman that the minister of the interior and others had directed the police action in order to compel the president to leave office, with Feng Yuxiang cooperating. On 13 June Li wrote to the diplomatic corps, “Finding I cannot perform freely the duties of my office, I am going to Tientsin,” and left Beijing by train that day. He was held at Tianjin station for about twelve hours; after negotiations he confirmed his resignation and telephoned one of his wives, who was at the French hospital in Beijing, to turn over the presidential seals, which she had kept and until then absolutely refused to give up. Only then was he allowed to proceed to his house in the Tianjin concession. Japanese reference works sum this up as his being driven out by Cao Kun, after which he left politics.

Last Years in Tianjin and State Funeral

According to The Paper, in November 1923 he travelled from Shanghai to Japan for medical treatment and returned to Tianjin in May 1924, living there for the rest of his life and largely staying out of politics. In his later years he invested in banking, mining, textiles, food, insurance and other industries, to a total of no less than three million yuan; he suffered for years from diabetes and high blood pressure. On 25 May 1928 he collapsed while watching a horse race; on 1 June he dictated a will and circulated it by telegram, and on 3 June he died at his home in Tianjin. The will called for a national assembly to be convened quickly to settle the political crisis, and stressed that the fundamental spirit, morality and rites on which the nation had stood for thousands of years should be valued above material civilisation.

The Nationalist government in Nanjing promptly issued an order stating that Li had helped bring about the republic in the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 and had served the Republic with merit, and decided to give him a state funeral, the first it held for a head of state of the Beiyang era. Chiang Kai-shek, Yan Xishan and Li Zongren sent representatives to pay their respects in Tianjin, and Duan Qirui, his bitter rival in the dispute of 1917, came with a eulogy of his own. On 24 November 1935 his coffin was buried on Tugong Hill south of Zhuodaoquan in Wuchang. In 1966 the tomb was destroyed by Red Guards; in 1981 the Wuhan government built a new tomb behind the original site to mark the seventieth anniversary of the 1911 Revolution.

Views of Li differ widely. Feng Tianyu’s article, titled “Li Yuanhong: A Hanger-on of the Beiyang Politicians,” concentrates on his suppression of Hubei revolutionaries during the Second Revolution; the American scholar Joseph Esherick has argued that the choice of Li to lead the new Hubei military government was perhaps the most important decision made during the Wuchang Uprising; and the historian Zhang Kaiyuan has said that, however halting and tortuous his steps, Li was one of the pioneers who took the first step on China’s road to a republic. The Japanese Heibonsha World Encyclopedia observes that he represented the old forces in relation to Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionary forces in relation to Yuan Shikai, and that both his presidencies came at moments when the Beiyang regime had been forced to give ground.