Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China

"After the 1911 Revolution and the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, there was an inability of the newly-founded Republic of China to get on its feet. One reason for that was the jockeying for power among military strongmen. They had armies that seemed more loyal to them than to the country. Sun Yat-sen was briefly the provisional president, but he was nudged aside by the ultimate warlord, Yuan Shikai, who had been a powerful general in Qing times. He maneuvered himself into power. He initially ruled as President of the Republic but then set himself up as an emperor. That’s something that happens periodically in China. In recent cases it hasn’t been as overt, but for a time you couldn’t talk about Yuan Shikai on the Chinese internet without censors stepping in. After Xi Jinping did away with term limits, people used allusions to or images of Yuan Shikai as a coded way to suggest that the president-who-makes-himself-an-emperor phenomenon was not just one of the past. Kate Merkel-Hess is fascinated by this period of disunity and uncertainty in China—particularly the late 1910s and 1920s—before it settles into a version of one-party rule, first under the Nationalists and then under the Communist Party. (Full disclaimer: Kate was a student of mine at UC Irvine and we were also involved in the collective China Beat blog, of which she was the first editor.) Kate has always been a lovely writer, writing for broad audiences in places like the TLS, and this new book, her second solo written one, reads really well. I love the title, Women and Their Warlords , rather than the other way around. One of the goals of the book is to unsettle the stereotype of this period as being all about men battling for control of the pie. She wants you to think about them as a set of people who believed in different things and had different ideas about how to strengthen the country—an ongoing concern of Chinese political leaders from the late Qing on. She wants us to think about them as influenced by different kinds of intellectual currents at the time. Liberal ideas made an impact on some of them; they were connected to different religious traditions. Above all, though, she wants you to think about the women in their lives–what these women did on their own and how they influenced powerful and better known men. Her focus is the wives, consorts, and in some cases daughters of military men, and the new roles these women carved out for themselves in political life. They were political figures whose high profile came in part because of their connection to the men, but who also found creative ways to pursue passion projects and things that animated them. Some were drawn to socialist ideas and to the Communist Party; some to Christianity. The book populates the period with more interesting, complex individuals than standard accounts, a collage of sorts, to go back to the metaphor I used earlier. There have been a couple of popular histories recently, set in the same era. There was one last year about a train robbery, Peking Express by James Zimmerman , which I reviewed for the TLS . Paul French, a consistently engaging writer, also has a very enjoyable book just out, Her Lotus Year , which is about Wallis Simpson’s time in China. It was a period of disunity, of China’s weakness in the world, when it was being bullied. But you can also think about it as a time when different groups and individuals, including the women who interest Kate, were experimenting with varied ways that society could be reorganized. It’s mixed. They have different degrees of education. None beside the one you mention was a household name outside of China. At the time there were people who thought of Chiang Kai-shek as just another warlord and there were people who are now thought of as warlords who aspired to be nation-building figures like Chiang Kai-shek was. There have been a lot of biographies of Soong (and some about her and her sisters, two of whom also married important men, Sun Yat-sen in one case), so you could call this a book about her metaphoric cousins."