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This TL explores a POD which I so far haven't seen on this board. Yuan Shikai was quite an able administrator and officer before he made the stupid decision to found a new dynasty. This TL explores a China in which he doesn't get delusions of grandeur and remains an ordinary military dictator, thus largely avoiding the warlord age which will make for a stronger China in the 1930s and thereafter. China will still be rather unpleasant place to live for some time, especially for minorities, considering the nature of this nationalistic militaristic regime. Anyway, enjoy.
Yuan Shikai’s Republic
Chapter I: Revolution, Fragmentation and Reunification, 1911-1921.
During the Xinhai Revolution against the Qing dynasty that started in 1911, Yuan Shikai was in command of the Beiyang Army, the core of the New Army which was the only force with the ability to quell the rebellion. Unfortunately for the Qing the Beiyang Army’s stance toward the revolution was ambivalent at best and so Yuan Shikai remained indecisive. His forces did capture Hankou and Hanyang in preparation for an assault on Wuchang which forced the revolutionaries to negotiate while Yuan posited demands at the Qing court as well since he knew how important he was to them. He negotiated the abdication of child Emperor Puyi and guaranteed Empress Dowager Longyu the safety of the imperial family and in return he was made President of the Republic of China.
After internal bickering in Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance, Sun reluctantly accepted Yuan Shikai as (interim) President instead of himself (he had been proclaimed president earlier in January 1912) and parliamentary elections were to be organised in 1913. Sun did demand that the capital be moved to the old Ming dynasty centre of rule, Nanjing, but Yuan fabricated a coup d’état which “required his presence in Beijing”. In reality he didn’t want to move out of his powerbase in Zhili province. In the 1913 elections, the first democratic elections in all of Chinese history, the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang won a significant victory, gaining the most seats in the National Assembly. The result was that Yuan Shikai felt threatened by the Nationalists, and especially Song Jiaoren who seemed to be prime candidate for the position of Prime Minister and who was a fierce proponent of a cabinet system with a democratically elected parliament (which was not in Yuan’s best interest if he wanted to maintain his authoritarian style of rule). Song was assassinated by a lone gunman while en route to Beijing, allegedly on Yuan’s orders although this couldn’t be proven. Next, in 1913, a campaign started to crack down on the Kuomintang and Yuan used his military might to easily defeat KMT forces. His victory was quick and remaining KMT officials in the government bureaucracy, provincial governors with KMT sympathies, and KMT members in the National Assembly were bribed or willingly submitted to Yuan Shikai’s rule. Sun fled and called for a second revolution which ultimately resulted in an enormous failure. It was shortly hereafter that Japan posited its Twenty-One Demands and their conditions led to riots and a boycott of Japanese goods until the West forced Japan to drop most of its demands which meant that Japan didn’t gain much more than it already had.
It was around this time that Yuan Shikai had entertained the idea of restoring the monarchy with himself as Emperor. Indeed, some of his supporters advocated this idea since the Chinese were only used to autocratic rule anyway and they believed that the Republican phase had been a mere transitional phase. However, among the general population there was no support for a revival of the monarchy. Yuan after some doubting decided against it, fearing a revolution, and instead styled himself as a regular military strongman and allowed a National Assembly with his puppets in it to remain as a means of legitimizing his rule. For the same reason he rejected the Twenty-One Demands since he didn’t need Japanese support if he wasn’t going to do something risky like restoring the monarchy. He did bestow the rank of generalissimo on himself and was “re-elected” as President in 1917 in obviously rigged elections. He wrote down a new constitution which enlarged presidential power and in which the length of a term in office for the President was set at seven years without term limits and with parliamentary elections every five years (although his own newly founded “Fatherland Party” always won).
After this episode, Yuan started to seek support from foreign powers to consolidate his rule which was relatively secure as long as Japan stayed out of things. The Beiyang Army, the dominant unit of the New Army, consisted of 75.000 men in six groups of 12.500 men each. The New Army was an armed force based on Western standards, a professional army trained in modern tactics and equipped with Western armaments, although this was only part of the entire Chinese army and not that large a unit. This force, however, was the strongest and most modern government force and much stronger than all the irregular forces running about in China’s outlying territories and it was completely loyal to Yuan Shikai, thus giving him a powerbase which made him a daunting foe. It made him the dominant political force in China at the time although warlords needed to be dealt with in the frontier regions, not to mention the Mongolian declaration of independence which were not insurmountable obstacles as long as foreign powers didn’t meddle with Yuan Shikai’s affairs. Therefore, Yuan struck a number of deals with the French and British governments who were stuck in trench warfare against the Germans on the Western Front in what was World War I. In 1917, Chinese labourers left for France where they could work in factories, work in mines, transport ammunition, clean up battlefields, dig trenches, repair roads and railroads and so on, freeing up men for the front. Yuan’s government also symbolically declared war on the Central Powers (he didn’t have the finances for any kind of serious war effort; it did give him the opportunity to use Western aid in modernising his army). The French and British sent a few military advisors who taught New Army officers the latest Western military tactics and they were generous enough to equip an entire 5.000 man regiment with Western weapons like rifles, machine guns, mortars, French rapid fire 75 mm field guns and two dozen or so lightly armed reconnaissance aircraft.
Eventually in January 1918, Yuan sent about 3.000 men to the Western front which were funded by American money (the US had entered World War I by now as well, and the US were the largest holder of credit since the Old World had spent a lot of money on the war already). Chinese forces distinguished themselves in Germany’s Spring Offensive, offering heroic if not fanatic resistance against the Germans even in the face of enormous losses and possibly defeat. They then partook in subsequent Entente offensives which drove the Germans back, leading to their surrender in November 1918. This event was key in China’s development since this inspired a slight flicker of patriotism, Chinese self-confidence and something resembling national pride.
This Chinese sense of self was enflamed when the Treaty of Versailles was being drafted to punish Germany. It had nothing to do with pity for Germany in any way or a sense of solidarity, but with what China perceived as Western betrayal and favouritism toward Japan. In the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s concession at Qingdao in Shandong province was awarded as a prize to Japan rather than returned to China like Yuan had hoped in return for participation in the war against Germany. Even US President Woodrow Wilson acknowledged Japan’s possession of Qingdao even if it was reluctantly and because of antipathy against Yuan Shikai’s militaristic, dictatorial regime since he blamed him for destroying democracy in China. The Chinese delegation at Versailles barged out and China signed a separate peace with Germany in the Treaty of Ningbo signed in July 1919 in which both sides agreed to a status quo ante bellum peace. Enormous protests arose in Beijing over the Treaty of Versailles which led to a number of anti-Western demonstrations and riots across China in which the French embassy was set on fire. Yuan was obliged to apologize and he reluctantly put the movement down, but also broke ties with the Entente powers and instead got cosy with the new German Weimar Republic and also recognised the communist regime in Russia as the first government to do so, earning him the ire of the Whites. He didn’t have any love for communism and only did it as a protest, much like his ties with Germany, and didn’t support Lenin’s regime militarily.
With renewed and vigorous nationalistic rhetoric he also gained support from large segments of the populace, specifically from the urban population which had quicker access to newspapers and other sources of information. They rallied behind their leader which gave him the means to consolidate his authoritarian regime which was deemed necessary to rebuild China by state propaganda. De facto, the Treaty of Versailles legitimized his iron fist rule since it proved that the West and Japan couldn’t be trusted. The National Assembly was further weakened and parliamentary procedure became a farce with the emergence of this xenophobic, nationalistic regime. Han Chinese nationalism became the dominant ideology while ethnic minorities had to their best to avoid suspicion. Yuan Shikai’s military intelligence services became dreaded by the regime’s enemies who were ruthlessly hunted down and punished for their trouble.
In the meantime, he spent his military forces on crushing resistance against his regime. By 1919, Western equipment sales and training had allowed him to expand the New Army to 125.000 men. In Xinjiang, a political opponent had declared himself independent while Western and Central Chinese provincial governors only nominally recognised Yuan Shikai and were de facto independent, as was Mongolia which was now a theocratic state. He first addressed the warlords in Qinghai, Gansu and parts of Shaanxi and western Inner Mongolia which ranged from local thugs controlling a handful of villages to regional military commanders, governors and landlords with their own army units, militias or armed peasant units. A number of these claimed loyalty to the Qing dynasty although de facto they were in it for their own gain, growing opium which had been banned for decades or squeezing tolls out of travellers or protection money out of entrepreneurs, shop owners and so on.
Yuan succeeded in defeating the warlords in a campaign between 1918 and 1920 in which his New Army forces proved superior to militias and rebellious soldiers equipped with two to three decades old equipment, usually largely lacking modern communications, artillery and machine guns and without a professional officers corps. In 1921, Yuan defeated Mongolia and ended its short-lived independence after baron Ungern von Sternberg had been defeated. In this 1921 Mongolian Campaign one notable person also fought. This was Chiang Kai-shek who had switched allegiance to Yuan’s junta out of self-preservation (plus he had contacts with former KMT elements in the government which made him useful to Yuan) which earned him the position of lieutenant. He commanded a battalion of New Army infantry and was appointed commandant of the Baoding Military Academy founded by Yuan himself and staffed with German and experienced New Army officers (this would give him great influence among a new generation of officers). Yuan hereby consolidated his rule over all former Qing territories even if hold over it all remained tenuously fragile, especially with China looking over his back. China was one again nonetheless after a decade of fragmentation.