Zhang Zuolin

Biography

Zhang Zuolin was born in 1875 to a poor farming family in Haicheng, in the Manchurian province of Fengtian. With almost no schooling, he served as a cavalryman in the First Sino-Japanese War and then led a band of mounted irregulars in the Manchurian countryside. His men joined the imperial forces during the Boxer Rebellion, worked for the Japanese army as hired fighters in the Russo-Japanese War, and were finally taken into the regular Qing army as a frontier regiment.

During the 1911 revolution Zhang helped the provincial governor keep Fengtian out of revolutionary hands, and he then backed Yuan Shikai, who made him a lieutenant-general and later military governor of Fengtian. After Yuan's death in 1916 he held both the military and civil governorship, and by 1918 he controlled all three northeastern provinces. Beijing recognised his position in 1920 by naming him governor-general of the Three Eastern Provinces.

At the head of the Fengtian clique, Zhang ran Manchuria almost as a separate state. With his finance chief Wang Yongjiang he stabilised the currency, repaid provincial debts and encouraged settlement, railways and industry. He also intervened repeatedly in northern China: he helped oust Duan Qirui in 1920, lost the First Zhili-Fengtian War in 1922, and came out on top in the second in 1924. The cost of these campaigns later wrecked the Manchurian economy.

Zhang took Beijing in 1926 and in June 1927 proclaimed himself Generalissimo, heading the internationally recognised Beiyang government. Defeated by the Kuomintang's Northern Expedition, he left Beijing on 3 June 1928. The next morning a bomb planted by officers of Japan's Kwantung Army wrecked his train near Shenyang, and he died within hours. His son Zhang Xueliang succeeded him and soon accepted Nationalist rule.