Li Zongren was born in Xixiang Village (西鄉村), near Guilin in Guangxi, the second eldest in a Han family of five boys and three girls.

For the next few years the warlords of Guangxi and Guangdong were involved in mutually destructive battles, and both occupied portions of each other's territory at various times.

When Lu's invasion suffered a disastrous defeat, Li led the rear guard when the Old Guangxi Clique forces retreated.

Foreign missionaries and aid workers active in Guangxi at this time reported that banditry in Guangxi was extremely common and severe, with bandits commonly looting all food and valuables from undefended villages and resorting to murder and public cannibalism in order to extort ransoms from the relatives of people they kidnapped.

As chaos became the norm in Guangxi, Li became the independent commander of an area several counties large on the Guangdong border, and was joined by his old friend and colleague Huang Shaoxiong.

The administration of Li and Huang was credited with keeping the area they controlled relatively free of the bandits and petty battles that plagued Guangxi at the time.

The next month Sun Yat-sen, from his base of operations in Guangdong, recognized Li Zongren and his allies Huang Shaoxing and Bai Chongxi as the rulers of Guangxi.

Li's first victories as a Nationalist general were in Hunan, where he defeated rival warlord Wu Peifu in two successive battles and captured the provincial capital, Wuhan, in 1926.

[4] Against the advice of his Soviet advisors, Li then marched up the north side of the Yangze to attack the forces of warlord Sun Chuanfang.

[4] By the time Li Zongren defeated Sun Chuanfang, he had gained a reputation as being strongly opposed to communism and highly suspicious of the Comintern in China, and his army was one of the few KMT detachments free from serious Communist influence.

[5] In April 1928 Li, with Bai Chongxi, led the Fourth Army group in an advance on Beijing, capturing Handan, Baoding and Shijiazhuang by June 1.

In January 1929 he dismissed Nanjing's appointee to the Hunan provincial committee and, fearing retribution, uncharacteristically fled to the foreign concessions in Shanghai.

[9] Under Li's command the defense of Tai'erzhuang was a major victory for the Chinese, killing 20,000–30,000 Japanese soldiers and capturing a large amount of supplies and equipment.

Chiang resigned the next year, on 21 January 1949, as a response to several serious Chinese Communist victories in northern China, and Li became the acting president the next day.

After the resignation of Chiang from the presidency, Mao Zedong momentarily halted attacks against Kuomintang territories, attempting to negotiate a KMT surrender.

When the Communists captured the Nationalist capital of Nanjing in April 1949, Li refused to accompany the central government as it fled to Guangdong, instead expressing his dissatisfaction with Chiang by retiring to Guangxi.

[14] Former warlord Yan Xishan, who had fled to Nanjing only one month before, quickly inserted himself into the rivalry, attempting to have Li and Chiang reconcile their differences in the effort to resist the Communists.

The inability of Li to coordinate KMT military forces led him to put into effect a plan of defense that he had contemplated as early as 1948.

The object of this strategy was to maintain a foothold on the Chinese mainland in the hope that the United States would eventually be compelled to enter the war in China on the Nationalist side.

[16] After Guangdong fell to the Communists, Chiang relocated the government to Chongqing, while Li effectively surrendered his powers and flew to New York City for treatment of his chronic duodenum illness at the Hospital of Columbia University.

[19] Li remained in exile until 20 July 1965, when he caused a sensation by returning to Communist-held China with the support of Zhou Enlai.

Like many Chinese leaders in the 1930s, Li was once an admirer of European Fascism, seeing it as a solution to the problems of a once proud nation humbled by internal dissension and external weakness.

Li was an admirer of the British historian Edward Gibbon and his monumental historical work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

[6] Li and his close staff member, the Muslim General Bai Chongxi, were powerful partners in politics and military affairs.

[20] A set of Samurai swords and daggers from the Edo period given to Li Zongren as a "gift of truce between enemies who are now friends" by either Seishirō Itagaki or Rensuke Isogai were passed on to Alan Lee as part of the family legacy.

Li's memoir is notable for its vehement criticism of Chiang Kai-shek and its analysis of Japan's strategic failure to conquer China.