How did the Beiyang warlords appear?

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How did the Beiyang warlords appear?

Although Yuan Shikai is gone, the Beiyang system is still there. At that time, Beiyang, including the Hunan Army and the Huai Army (the Huai Army later became the Huai Clan), were all political and military groups with a strong color of their own. Although the Beiyang Army is more modern than the previous Hunan-Huai Army, it still has a strong sense of self-loyalty. In other words, this personal dependence is still very strong. The most outstanding person is Yuan Shikai, and everyone else was chosen by him and is his subordinate, so everyone obeys his orders. However, after Yuan Shikai's death, it is difficult for his successors to have such prestige.

Like the three heroes of Beiyang, Wang Shizhen, Feng Guozhang and Duan Qirui, they are equal in number, and there are many people with basically the same qualifications as them, such as Zhang Xun, Lu Jianzhang, Duan Zhigui, etc., there are actually a lot of them People are basically brothers and sisters, and they are basically the same. However, comparatively speaking, the oldest ones are still the three mentioned above. In other words, for all officers in the Beiyang system, Duan Qirui is their nominal teacher. Based on this alone, Duan Qirui's popularity will definitely surpass Feng Guozhang's. No one else can compare with him, so he is the leader at this moment.

In the first two years of Duan Qirui's administration, factional disputes began to appear in the Beiyang Army, mainly between the Anhui clique and the Zhili clique. But at that time, the Zhili clique was really not strong enough to compete with the Anhui clique, so when Duan Qirui was in power, there was a slogan called "The Anhui clique is the center," and we all agreed. Besides, the factions at that time were not as clear-cut as we later said. Now for the convenience of research, we often talk about who belongs to whom, but these are all relative. Although every faction has an inner circle, there is no doubt about it. For example, the relationship between Feng Guozhang and Li Chun is very ironclad and cannot be touched; It is very iron and cannot be moved; Duan Qirui is also very close to the people around him, such as Xu Shuzheng, Jin Yunpeng and others.

The upper-class elements who have entered the center will not change at all, but the warlords large and small on the margins cannot tell. It is difficult for us to tell who is who, because many people are often unstable. For example, Cao Kun, it was later said that he was directly related, but in the first two years he was not close to Feng Guozhang, but he had a good relationship with Duan Qirui, otherwise he would not have gone south to fight for Duan Qirui's government in 1917, and So hardworking. Of course, I have no evidence to prove that he was with Duan Qirui from the beginning and only later joined the Zhili. All in all these are hard to say.

It should also be pointed out that it is not certain to distinguish the two major factions based on the geographical orientation of the Anhui clique and the Zhili clique. It is only said that the leaders of the two factions are Anhui and Zhili people. Cao Kun can be said to be directly related, because he was from Baoding, which was still the capital at that time, and Feng Guozhang was from Hejian. There is no doubt about this. But look at Feng Yuxiang, he is from Anhui and joined the Zhili system. Lu Jianzhang, a native of Anhui, also belonged to the Zhili clique, and he was particularly fierce in his opposition to the Anhui clique. Therefore, the participants of each faction are not selected based on geographical connections.

In other words, before the war started, Beiyang’s Zhili, Anhui and Feng cliques, even Zhang Xun, other Yijun, and even the original Huaijun left behind There are criss-cross connections between the troops on each mountaintop, and there is no serious gap between them. We must be careful not to use today's thinking to apply ancient logic when analyzing factional issues in the imperial system or the Republic of China. Factions with clear boundaries can only occur in modern politics, and they are no longer so clear-cut.