The Warlord Era was the period in the history of the Republic of China between 1916 and 1928, when control of the country was divided between rival military cliques of the Beiyang Army and other regional factions.

The warlords of southern China, who had cooperated against Yuan's dictatorship and then Duan's attempt to extend Beiyang control to the south, were divided between the Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Sichuan cliques.

[4] Previously, these militarist leaders were known as a Tuchun (督軍), or provincial military governor, owing to the system Yuan Shikai introduced after his centralization of power.

Yuan renounced his plans for restoring the monarchy to woo back his lieutenants; however, by the time of his death in June 1916, China had fractured politically.

A theme identified by C. Martin Wilbur was "that a great majority of regional militarists were 'static', that is to say that their principal aim was to secure and maintain control of a particular tract of territory.

"[14] Warlords, in the words of American political scientist Lucian Pye, were "instinctively suspicious, quick to suspect that their interests might be threatened, hard-headed, devoted to the short run and impervious to idealistic abstractions".

Promotion had little to do with competence, and instead warlords attempted to create an interlocking network of familial, institutional, regional, and master-pupil relationships together with membership in sworn brotherhoods and secret societies.

Furthermore, warlords did not have the economic or logistical capabilities required to achieve decisive victories, and were generally concerned instead with taking over smaller pieces of territory.

To hinder pursuit, defeated troops tore up the railroads as they retreated; in 1924, damages amounted to 100 million Mexican silver dollars (the main currency used in China at the time).

Yan Xishan, the "Model Governor" of Shanxi, professed a syncretic creed that merged elements of democracy, militarism, individualism, capitalism, socialism, communism, imperialism, universalism, anarchism, and Confucian paternalism into one.

Feng Yuxiang, the "Christian General", promoted Methodism together with a vague sort of left-leaning Chinese nationalism, which led the Soviets to support him for a time.

Wu liked to appear in photos taken in his office with a portrait of his hero George Washington in the background to reflect the supposed democratic militarism he was attempting to bring to China.

Former Emperor Puyi remembered Zhang as "a universally detested monster" whose ugly, bloated face was "tinged with the livid hue induced by heavy opium smoking".

He was widely believed to be the most well endowed man in China, nicknamed "General Eighty-Six" as his penis when erect was said to measure up to a pile of 86 Mexican silver dollars (25.8 cm or 10.16 in).

In 1926 U.S. Army officer Joseph Stilwell inspected a warlord unit and observed that 20% were less than 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 m) tall, the average age was 14 and most walked barefoot.

A British army visitor commented that, provided they had proper leadership, the men of northern China were "the finest Oriental raw material with a physique second to none, and an iron constitution".

The illiterate Marshal Zhang Zuolin, who engaged in reckless printing of Chinese dollars, did not understand it was him who was causing the inflation in Manchuria, and his remedy was simply to summon the leading merchants of Mukden, accuse them of greed because they were always raising their prices, had five of them selected at random publicly shot and told the rest to behave better.

The inability to use their machine guns properly proved costly: after taking Urga in February 1921, Ungern had his Cossacks and Mongol cavalry hunt down the remnants of Xu's troops as they attempted to flee south on the road back to China.

[36] During the crossing of the Russian-Chinese border in November 1922 and the disarmament, the Chinese authorities of Marshal Zhang Zuolin bought or received for free almost all the weapons of the Russian White Army, which left Vladivostok.

[37] When importing weapons became impractical, warlord armies either used locally-made copies of Western firearms (including ones in uncommon use such as the Franz Stock Pistol) or indigenous designs.

The most highly paid of the Russian units was led by Gen. Konstantin Nechaev, who fought for Zhang Zongchang, the "Dogmeat General" who ruled Shandong province.

[51] Wu Aitchen mentioned that 600 Uyghurs were slaughtered in a battle by White Russian mercenaries in the service of the Xinjiang clique warlord Jin Shuren.

[56] To defend themselves from the attacks of the warlord factions and armies, peasants organized themselves into militant secret societies and village associations which served as self-defense militias as well as vigilante groups.

As the peasants usually had neither money for guns nor military training, these secret societies relied on martial arts, self-made weapons such as swords and spears, as well as the staunch belief in protective magic.

[60] The former would dress entirely in white (the color of death in China) and waved fans that they believed would deflect gunfire,[26] while the latter fought with a sword and a magical basket to catch their opponents' bullets.

[60] Disappointed with the Republic of China and despairing due to the warlords deprivations, many peasant secret societies adopted millenarian beliefs,[59] and advocated the restoration of the monarchy, led by the old Ming dynasty.

With Sun driven out of Guangzhou, the Zhili clique superficially restored the constitutional government that existed prior to Zhang Xun's coup.

In the autumn of 1924 the Zhili appeared to be on the verge of complete victory in the Second Zhili–Fengtian War until Feng Yuxiang betrayed the clique, seized Beijing and imprisoned Cao.

The Fengtian clique remained in control of the capital until the Northern Expedition led by Chiang Kai-shek's National Revolutionary Army forced Zhang out of power in June 1928.

The National Revolutionary Army (NRA) formed by the KMT swept through southern and central China until it was checked in Shandong, where confrontations with the Japanese garrison escalated into armed conflict.