Zhang Zuolin

Origins and Early Years

Zhang Zuolin, courtesy name Yuting, was born in 1875 in Haicheng County, Fengtian (now Liaoning). According to the Japanese Heibonsha World Encyclopedia, he came from a poor peasant family, avoided steady work and rose to prominence among the “greenwood” bandits. The scholar Zhi Xiaomin writes that during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 he served as a cavalryman in Song Qing’s Yi Army; afterwards he returned to western Liaoning, married the daughter of the local gentry member Zhao Zhanyuan and organised a self-defence militia. According to Yamakawa’s Concise Dictionary of World History, he accepted a Qing offer of amnesty around 1903 and became the leader of a local force.

During the Russo-Japanese War, western Liaoning was nominally neutral. The Nipponica encyclopedia says Zhang operated covertly as an auxiliary of the Japanese army, while the Heibonsha encyclopedia says he was reputed to have spied for both sides; Zhi Xiaomin writes that he was once captured by the Japanese and nearly killed. In 1907, after capturing the bandit Du Lishan, he was promoted to command a Fengtian patrol battalion. During the 1911 Revolution he led his troops into the provincial capital to keep order, serving as deputy head of the military department of the Fengtian Citizens’ Security Association, and won the favour of the viceroy Zhao Erxun.

Building the Fengtian Clique

After the founding of the Republic, Zhang became commander of the 27th Division in 1912. In 1916 he drove out the Fengtian military governor Duan Zhigui and became military governor and civil governor of Fengtian. That year Japanese adventurers, angered by his refusal to back “Manchurian–Mongolian independence,” attempted to assassinate him with bombs, but he escaped. In 1918 he was appointed inspector-general of the Three Eastern Provinces and sent troops south into North China, greatly enlarging his army. In July 1919 a clash between Jilin troops and a Japanese garrison at Changchun, the Kuanchengzi Incident, was followed by Beijing’s removal of Zhang’s rival, the Jilin military governor Meng Enyuan, in favour of the Fengtian general Sun Liechen, giving Zhang control of all three provinces. Japanese reference works note that he kept many Japanese military advisers and that he and Japan used each other, though he also openly opposed Japan’s Twenty-One Demands.

The Zhili–Fengtian Wars and Beijing

In 1920 Zhang intervened in the struggle between the Zhili and Anhui cliques and entered national politics. Defeated by the Zhili clique in the First Zhili–Fengtian War of 1922, he withdrew beyond the Great Wall; in the second war of 1924 he won decisively, extending his power across North and East China as far as Jiangsu and Shanghai, with an army said to number 360,000 at its height in 1925. Sun Chuanfang and Feng Yuxiang then turned against him, and at the end of 1925 his subordinate Guo Songling rebelled; according to the Britannica International Encyclopaedia, the crisis was resolved only through the intervention of the Kwantung Army. In 1926 he allied with Wu Peifu to drive out Feng’s Guominjun, took control of the Beijing government and at the end of the year became commander-in-chief of the National Pacification Army, proclaiming a campaign against communism.

The Military Government and the Generalissimo

In April 1927 Zhang ordered a search of the Soviet embassy in Beijing; Li Dazhao and other Communists were arrested, and Li and some twenty others were later executed. In June he formed a military government in Beijing and assumed the title of Generalissimo of the Army and Navy, exercising the powers of head of state in opposition to the Nationalists’ Northern Expedition. Japanese reference works record that Japan did not favour his expansion into national politics.

In the spring of 1928, as the Northern Expedition advanced and his armies suffered repeated defeats, Zhang decided to return to Manchuria. According to Zhi Xiaomin, before he left the Japanese minister Yoshizawa Kenkichi pressed him to sign a secret agreement, which he refused, saying that as a man of the Northeast, where his grandparents were buried, he could not sell out the Northeast and be cursed by posterity as a traitor. This account appears only in that article and has not been corroborated by other sources consulted.

Death at Huanggutun

According to an article in the Liaoshen Evening News reprinted by China News Service, Zhang announced his withdrawal from Beijing on 2 June. Warnings had reached him that the Japanese intended to strike on his journey, and the Fengtian gendarmerie commander Qi Enming reported that Japanese guards had cordoned off the area around the Sandong Bridge near Huanggutun; Zhang considered travelling by car but finally chose the train. In the small hours of 3 June he boarded at Beijing’s Qianmen East station in the uniform of Generalissimo. At about 5 a.m. on 4 June, as the train passed beneath the Sandong Bridge where the South Manchuria Railway crossed the Beijing–Mukden line, an explosion wrecked it; the Heilongjiang military governor Wu Junsheng, travelling with him, was killed outright, and Zhang died later that morning after being carried back to his residence. His death was kept secret and officially announced only on 21 June, after his son Zhang Xueliang had taken charge in Fengtian.

Who was behind the bombing was disputed at the time, with some blaming Chiang Kai-shek’s side and, more recently, claims of Soviet agents; Japanese encyclopedias and historical dictionaries attribute it to Colonel Kōmoto Daisaku of the Kwantung Army, who sought a pretext for military action. The Japanese historian Kurahashi Masanao argues that Zhang grew into a warlord with Japanese backing and that the two sides used each other, but that once he became a national figure with ties to the United States and others he no longer always did Japan’s bidding, which was probably the main reason he was killed.