Republican era & warlordism

From Empire to Republic

The Republic of China was proclaimed at Nanjing on 1 January 1912, with Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) inaugurated as Provisional President. On 12 February 1912 the boy-emperor Puyi abdicated under the Imperial Edict of Abdication negotiated by Yuan Shikai, ending the Qing dynasty and two millennia of imperial rule. Sun, lacking military force, ceded the presidency to Yuan Shikai on 10 March 1912, on condition that Yuan uphold the Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China (临时约法), promulgated 11 March 1912, which established a cabinet-responsible parliamentary system designed to constrain him.

Yuan Shikai's Dictatorship and Monarchical Failure

Yuan systematically dismantled republican institutions. After the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang/Guomindang), reorganized by Song Jiaoren, won the parliamentary elections of December 1912–February 1913, Song was assassinated in Shanghai on 20 March 1913—an act widely attributed to Yuan's circle. Sun launched the abortive 'Second Revolution' (二次革命) in summer 1913, which Yuan crushed. Yuan then forced his own election as President in October 1913, banned the KMT in November 1913, and dissolved parliament in January 1914, replacing the 1912 charter with the Constitutional Compact (中华民国约法) of May 1914.

Yuan's acceptance of most of Japan's Twenty-One Demands on 9 May 1915—'National Humiliation Day'—discredited him. His attempt to enthrone himself as Emperor of the Empire of China, with the reign-title Hongxian to begin 1 January 1916, provoked the National Protection War (护国战争) led by Cai E in Yunnan. Yuan abandoned the monarchy on 22 March 1916 and died on 6 June 1916.

The Warlord Era (1916–1928)

Yuan's death removed the only figure commanding the Beiyang Army's loyalty, fragmenting China into competing militarist cliques. The principal factions were the Anhui clique (Duan Qirui), the Zhili clique (Feng Guozhang, Cao Kun, Wu Peifu), and the Fengtian clique (Zhang Zuolin of Manchuria), with regional warlords such as Yan Xishan in Shanxi and the 'Christian General' Feng Yuxiang. The Beijing government, though internationally recognized, was a prize fought over in the Zhili–Anhui War (1920), the First (1922) and Second (1924) Zhili–Fengtian Wars. Warlordism imposed predatory taxation, opium cultivation, and constant civil war on the populace.

Meanwhile Sun Yat-sen, repudiating the northern regime, established rival governments in Guangzhou and articulated the Three Principles of the People (三民主义): nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood (民族、民权、民生). The warlord disorder set the stage for the Northern Expedition (1926–1928), by which Chiang Kai-shek's National Revolutionary Army nominally reunified China under the Nanjing-based Nationalist government in 1928.

The May Fourth Movement and the New Culture

The intellectual rupture of the Republican era crystallized in the New Culture Movement, launched around Chen Duxiu's journal New Youth (新青年, founded 1915), which championed 'Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy' (赛先生与德先生), vernacular literature (Hu Shi, Lu Xun's 'A Madman's Diary', 1918), and assaults on Confucian orthodoxy. The decisive political eruption was the May Fourth Movement: on 4 May 1919, some 3,000 Beijing students demonstrated at Tiananmen against the Paris Peace Conference's decision to transfer Germany's Shandong concessions to Japan rather than return them to China. The protest forced the Beijing government to refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles. May Fourth is conventionally treated as the watershed between China's 'old democratic' and 'new democratic' revolutions.

Founding of the Chinese Communist Party

The Bolshevik Revolution and Comintern guidance channelled May Fourth radicalism into Marxism. Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu organized early communist cells, and the Chinese Communist Party held its First National Congress in Shanghai (and on a boat at Jiaxing's South Lake) in July 1921. Under Comintern direction, the First United Front was formed: the CCP entered the KMT as individuals after Sun Yat-sen's reorganization of the KMT along Leninist lines, formalized at the KMT First National Congress in January 1924. The Whampoa Military Academy was founded in 1924 with Chiang Kai-shek as commandant and Zhou Enlai heading its political department.

Collapse of the United Front and the Nanjing Decade

Sun Yat-sen died on 12 March 1925. The May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 inflamed anti-imperialist nationalism. As the Northern Expedition advanced, Chiang turned on his communist allies in the Shanghai Massacre of 12 April 1927 (四一二政变), shattering the First United Front and inaugurating the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937). The CCP responded with the Nanchang Uprising of 1 August 1927—commemorated as the founding of the People's Liberation Army—and Mao Zedong's Autumn Harvest Uprising, retreating to the Jinggang Mountains base.

Why this matters for the exam

For the Guokao Modern History paper, the Republican era is a dense, high-frequency zone. Examiners test the chain of causation: the 1912 abdication, Yuan's monarchical fiasco, warlord fragmentation, May Fourth, and the founding and breakdown of the First United Front. Past-year questions favour precise dates (1 January 1912; 4 May 1919; July 1921; 12 April 1927) and the significance of May Fourth as the boundary of the 'new democratic revolution'—a Party-historiography framing the Guokao expects you to reproduce. Retain the warlord cliques and their leaders, the Three Principles of the People, and the founding events of the CCP and PLA. Distinguish the Provisional Constitution (1912) from Yuan's Constitutional Compact (1914).