The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Before they could exploit their victory, however, the Guomindang’s parliamentary leader was gunned down by an assassin linked to President General Yuan Shi-kai. After a short-lived rebellion, concentrated mainly in the southern provinces, Sun Yat-sen and the rest of the Guomindang leadership fled into exile. Yuan prorogued the parliament and suspended the provisional constitution drafted by the revolutionaries. Backed by a foreign loan brokered by London and Japan, but boycotted by Wilson’s administration in Washington, Yuan attempted to initiate a fresh authoritarian turn. Yuan, who had come to national prominence in the last years of the empire as the commander of the New Model Army in North-Central China, was a military modernizer who had no faith in new-fangled constitutions.7 But what he did not reckon with was the opposition of the majority of the Chinese political class. When over the winter of 1915–16 Yuan made a bid to install himself as monarch, the result was nationwide revolt.8 By the spring of 1916 the southern provinces, the traditional counter-weight to Beijing, abetted by Japanese agents provocateurs, were in open opposition, demanding a federalist constitution.9 More threateningly, the younger leaders of Yuan’s own militarist grouping, General Duan Qirui of Anhui province and General Feng of Zhili, declared against their former patron.