After getting out of jail, Bai Lang was only dissuaded from becoming a bandit by his family, instead, turning his martial interests towards a legal outlet (namely, military service).

During the last years of Manchu rule, Bai was trained in tactics and weaponry in Japan, known at the time as much for its Chinese revolutionary activity as for its competence in modern military warfare.

Soon thereafter, the pro-revolutionary Gen. Wu was assassinated by or Beiyang Army troops loyal to Yuan Shikai and Bai was forced to return home for fear of his life.

[6][better source needed] After a series of storms ravaged the region's crops in late 1911, Bai and other local people fell in with the bandit Du Qibin.

[7] Bai Lang and his forces allied themselves with the Kuomintang during the so-called "Second Revolution", an attempt by the latter party to resist President Yuan Shikai's increasingly authoritarian regime.

The bandit leader managed to amass an army of 1,000 to 4,000 fighters,[5] and started to target in the area between Wuhan and Beijing, attacking the railway lines.

As his fame grew, deserters, bandits and revolutionaries bolstered his divisions and he swiftly moved through Henan, Anhui, Hupei, Shaanxi and Kansu, disrupting swaths of Northern China.

In Henan, the city of Yuxian, famed for its vital pharmaceutical industry,[clarification needed] was ransacked of everything from medicine to guns and the military governor, Zhang Zhenfang, was dismissed for his failure to suppress the uprising.

[5] Under tremendous military pressure from the government and allied warlords, including some of the earliest use of aircraft in warfare, Bai's "army" crossed the Tongguan Pass into Shaanxi Province, possibly with an eye toward sympathetic linkage there.

[13] Yuan Shikai managed to induce Ma Anliang to not attack Shaanxi after the Gelaohui took over the province and accept the Republic of China under his presidency in 1912.

[18] Protracted warfare and this lack of public support led to a reversal in the rebels' treatment of the population; there was an increase in acts of looting and pillage, as well as strikingly brutal massacres.

The North China Herald and Reginald Farrer accused Ma Anliang of betraying his fellow Muslims by letting them get slaughtered at Taozhou.

[30] Yuan Shikai's Beiyang regime knew of Bai Lang's connections with Sun Yat-Sen, but refused to make public of them for fear it would cause greater support for the rebellion.

Mostly uneducated, his troops could be divided between Robin Hood "freedom fighters" who believed they were taking on a corrupt regime and brigands who lived for plunder and survival.

Though he managed to reduce the power of other military leaders in the short term, these policies alienated parts of the Beiyang Army from his regime, weakening it in the long run.