Military Control and Discipline
The obvious solution to the financial burden created by enlarged provincial armies was to reduce their size. Recognizing this solution and carrying it out, though, were two different things. For the provincial governments to be able to implement an extensive program of disbandment, they had to be sufficiently in control of their armies to ensure obedience to demobilization orders. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, this was by no means a foregone conclusion. In both Hubei and Hunan, rapid military expansion was accompanied by a considerable weakening of the chain of command and a slackening of military discipline, which raised serious doubts about the ability of the provincial governments, or their military governors, to control their provincial armies. While making disbandment more difficult, the problem of military control became an additional argument for its necessity.
The proliferation of military units during the 1911 Revolution, however necessary, was hardly conducive to the establishment of a unified command. Lacking time to create a more elaborate military structure, new units were generally established as independent commands. This loose organization of revolutionary forces, and internal rivalries among them, made military coordination quite difficult. At the same time, the revolutionary inclination toward collective decision-making also worked against the consolidation of military command. Important military decisions, like other major policies, were often made by consensus in conferences of revolutionary leaders and military officers. While helping to legitimate revolutionary decision-making, this consensual equality also validated the independent political roles of individual commanders. Under field conditions, many commanders were not above taking action on little authority but their own. The success of revolutionary forces was generally owing more to their common purpose and high morale than to a strong unified command.
Simply in terms of military command, Li Yuanhong and Tan Yankai faced special problems in trying to assert the military authority they supposedly wielded as military governors. Even though both men owed their positions to a consensus of military and civil elites, this by no means assured them of unqualified military support. Indeed, they faced considerable resentment and antagonism within the military, particularly from revolutionary officers and soldiers. In Hunan, many revolutionary activists in the army harbored a grudge against Tan for what they saw as his acquiescence in the assassinations of Jiao Dafeng and Chen Zuoxin. In Hubei, many military men shared the general revolutionary disregard for Li as little more than a useful figurehead. Lacking strong military commands of their own, neither Tan nor Li could be assured that his military orders would always be obeyed.
Li Yuanhong was particularly troubled by the independence shown by the commanders of revolutionary forces outside the Wuhan area. One such commander was Ji Yulin, a revolutionary activist who had been appointed pacification commissioner (zhaotaoshi ) over Hubei's northwestern prefectures. Ji used this position to create a military power base for himself by consolidating various revolutionary forces that had arisen along the Han River. Ji also assumed control over northern Hubei's civil administration, appointing local officials and collecting taxes to support his army. In late December 1911, Ji joined Liu Gong to launch a "northern expedition" against imperial forces in Henan Province. This campaign was initiated after the declaration of a cease-fire and was continued even after the supposed
targets of the campaign declared their allegiance to the new Republic. Trying to preserve the peace, Li repeatedly ordered Ji to cease his advance. However, Ji ignored these commands and continued his attack until he had seized his objective, the southern Henan city of Nanyang. Thus, in the pursuit of their own revolutionary objectives, commanders like Ji Yulin did not necessarily feel bound to follow Li's orders.
Despite the initial weakness of their positions, Li and Tan were not without some means of consolidating their military authority. First, the political consensus that had made them military governors provided them with enough legitimacy to inhibit open opposition from most military commanders. Commanders might protest their orders, find ways to obstruct them, or, like Ji Yulin, even dare to ignore them, but to go any further would be an act of rebellion against recognized Republican authority. Second, as military governors, Li and Tan also held the power of appointment. As they consolidated their positions, they used this power both to undercut recalcitrant commanders and to build their own bases of military support.
One effective use of the power of appointment was the cancellation of branch military governments and other special titles that revolutionary commanders used to build local power bases. The elimination of such offices was noted in Chapter 3 as an important step in the restoration of provincial authority over local administration. An equally important goal, though, was to establish control over military forces that were only weakly subordinated to the provincial government. As such, the assertion of the military governor's authority had the general support of provincial officials and metropolitan commanders who favored the limitation of the civil and military autonomy of local commanders. The method pursued was not the total elimination of such commanders, but their restriction to military offices and their subordination to higher command structures. Thus, the cancellation of Ji Yulin's appointment as pacification commissioner was balanced by making him commander of the 8th Division. Likewise, the commander-in-chief of the branch military government in western Hubei, Tang Xizhi, was reappointed as commander of the 7th Division. The power of the commander of the Xiangyang branch military government, Zhang Guoquan, was reduced by his appointment as a brigade commander. Though these men retained control over their military forces, they lost the broader military and civil powers they had originally claimed.
Li and Tan also used the power of appointment to install military
officers more amenable to their control. For example, Li made noticeable efforts to place non-revolutionary officers in middle and lower officers' positions. Li won the loyalty of these men through this patronage and could use them to counterbalance revolutionary officers who had less respect for his authority. The divisional reorganizations carried out in early 1912 also provided Li and Tan with a means of increasing their military influence. First, the consolidation of miscellaneous military forces under these divisions helped to reestablish a military chain of command. Second, Li and Tan were able to fill some of the top positions in these divisions with comparatively loyal commanders. Insofar as patronage was being used to ensure loyalty, though, these actions did reintroduce a stronger element of personalism into the command structure.
Li's authority was weakest among the Hubei military commanders who gained their positions as a result of their revolutionary achievements and thus owed little to Li's favor. Four of the eight Hubei division commanders listed in Table 6 clearly belong in this category: Zhang Tingfu, Deng Yulin, Tang Xizhi, and Ji Yulin. Indeed, most officers listed on this table as having previously been junior officers or common soldiers owed their advancement to their revolutionary credentials. Nonetheless, other officers listed in Table 6 just as clearly owed their positions to Li's patronage. Most of these men were former company, regiment, or battalion commanders, usually with more advanced military educations, who had not been members of the revolutionary organizations that had planned the Wuchang uprising. One example was the 6th Division commander, Wang Anlan, who prior to the revolution was a member of Li's staff and a close companion. Two other prominent examples were the 1st Division commander, Tang Keming, and his subordinate 1st Brigade commander, Shi Xingchuan. Though Hubei natives, these men were Beiyang Army regiment commanders who came to Hubei after the outbreak of the revolution to offer their services to Li. These men all repaid Li's favor with loyalty. Tang even acknowledged this by changing his surname to Li. By using such men, Li was also able to take advantage of the rivalry that existed between officers who claimed revolutionary merit in the Wuchang uprising and those who arrived on the scene later.
Although Li could place some of his own men in military positions, he was not strong enough at first simply to remove revolutionary officers he saw as too independent. He did, however, take every opportunity to promote those willing to give him their support. One such opportunity arose with the February 1912 coup against Sun Wu.
Zhang Tingfu, the 2d Division commander, was killed during this incident, and Deng Yulin, the 4th Division commander, resigned in its wake. Li replaced Zhang with Du Xijun, a former Hubei New Army battalion commander and one of Sun Wu's close associates. Du was already inclined to follow Sun's lead in support of Li against more radical revolutionary officers, and this appointment drew him even closer to Li's side. Deng's replacement was the commander of the 7th Brigade, Cai Hanqing. Cai had been a soldier activist in the Forward Together Society, where he was also closely allied to Sun Wu. During the February 12 incident, Li was impressed by Cai's vigorous suppression of rioting soldiers and so selected him for advancement. Li's favor was justified, inasmuch as Cai proved to be one of his most dependable commanders. By such means, Li built a base of support among the senior commanders of the Hubei army.
Tan Yankai was in a better position than Li to select reliable senior commanders during the reorganization of the Hunan army in early 1912. Hunan's revolutionary organizations were relatively immature in contrast to Hubei's, and the province never became a part of the revolutionary battlefield. As a result, Hunan's revolutionary activists had less opportunity to establish their own strong military commands, thus giving Tan greater influence over military appointments. As seen in Table 7, the common soldiers and junior officers who advanced to top positions in the Hubei army were noticeably absent in Hunan. In their place, Tan patronized a more homogeneous and elite group of officers. With the obvious exception of Zhao Chunting, who had been a Patrol and Defense commander before the revolution, most of Hunan's brigade and division commanders had been mid-level New Army officers—that is, regiment or battalion commanders. Some of these men had joined the Tongmenghui in their student days, and most were sympathetic to revolutionary goals. As near as can be determined, though, none participated in the Changsha uprising; rather, they offered their services after its success. Although these officers' military credentials contributed to their selection, they ultimately owed their appointments to Tan. Furthermore, as indicated by their backgrounds (particularly the number with Japanese educations), these officers were a fairly upper-elite group, who would have had much in common with the other members of Tan Yankai's elite regime. Tan thus had reason to expect that they would prove amenable to his control.
Simply placing reliable men at the top of the command structure was not, however, enough to solve the problem of military control. Of equal or perhaps greater importance was the general lack of military
discipline within the provincial armies. In March 1912, Li Yuanhong gave this critical description of Chinese military forces in the wake of the revolution: "As warfare between north and south continued from autumn through winter, troops were hurriedly recruited, and they were all without discipline. They regarded destruction as meritorious action, and disorder as correct conduct. Insolence was equated with equality, and coercion with freedom . . . Reward and punishments ceased to be distinct, and orders were no longer obeyed." Other evidence confirms the accuracy of this pessimistic assessment. In December 1911, a British consular report from Changsha observed that "the local government is at the mercy of a military mob. One of the inevitable effects of the revolution has been a subversion of all military discipline, and the troops have been quick to realize their newly found power." Another critical account noted: "Middle and lower officers were unable to command their soldiers; senior officers could not command their subordinates. All sense of obedience to duty was gone." In Hunan, troops returning from the Hubei front proved particularly difficult to control, and there were many reports of disorderly soldiers wandering the streets at will, brawling and inciting conflicts with civilians. The picture was not much different in Hubei, where in early 1912 a visiting military officer observed that the "arrogance" of Hubei troops made them nearly impossible to control.
As suggested by Li Yuanhong's statement, the disciplinary problems of the postrevolutionary provincial armies were partially rooted in hurried and indiscriminate recruiting. The urgency of the revolution dictated that the quantity of soldiers be given higher priority than the maintenance of recruitment standards. The call for recruits received an enthusiastic response from all segments of society, including large numbers of student intellectuals. Nonetheless, many recruits were also drawn from the peasantry, the working class, and the urban and rural unemployed. A large number of these men had backgrounds that would have made them unacceptable as recruits to the earlier New Armies. One cynical account characterized Hunan's new troops as "chair-bearers, ruffians and beggars," whose idea of soldiering was to assume the poses of military figures in traditional opera. Although this influx of "ruffians" into the revolutionary forces may have affected general discipline, an equally important consequence of hurried recruiting was a lack of adequate training. Indeed, the only training many recruits got was the experience they received under fire. The high morale and enthusiasm of revolutionary soldiers may have made up for this deficiency, but these men were ill prepared to settle into a strict military regimen once the war was over.
The opportunity of preserving a block of more highly trained and disciplined troops was lost as a result of the failure to keep the New Armies intact. Instead, new forces were generally formed by mixing small bodies of New Army troops with greater numbers of old-style troops and new recruits. The formation of Hubei's 7th Division was a fairly typical example. This division's core consisted of three New Army battalions that had seized control of the western Hubei city of Yichang during the revolution. This force quickly expanded by absorbing three local Patrol and Defense battalions and by recruiting large numbers of new troops, including over a thousand Hubei-Sichuan railroad construction workers left unemployed by the outbreak of the revolution. Most of the original eight revolutionary brigades established at Wuhan were also built around one or two New Army battalions. In the end, Hubei's Training Corps was the only force more-or-less entirely made up of New Army troops. The dispersal of New Army soldiers among larger revolutionary units served the practical purpose of providing them with a leavening of better-trained and more experienced troops. At the same time, it also lowered the overall quality of the provincial armies and reversed most of the progress toward military modernization achieved in the New Armies.
Military discipline problems were no doubt also heightened by a severe deficiency of experienced officers. The late Qing military education system had barely been able to meet the needs of the New Armies. With the revolution, many senior and middle-level officers were forced out or abandoned their posts. Meanwhile, the proliferation of revolutionary forces created an even greater demand for officers. This left no alternative but the very rapid promotion of men whose qualifications would have restricted them to much lower positions in the New Armies. Thus, many junior officers, or even common soldiers, who had played leading roles in revolutionary uprisings assumed senior positions in new revolutionary forces. Other high positions were awarded to non-revolutionary lower- or middle-level officers who offered their services after the success of the uprisings. Thus the brigade and regiment commanders in the original revolutionary brigades at Wuhan included one former New Army battalion commander, eight company commanders, two platoon commanders, one sergeant, and eight common soldiers. Another practical reason for the dispersal of the provincial New Armies was that their educated and trained soldiers could fill lower officers' positions in expanded revolutionary units. Indeed, this sort of advancement was so common that bitter New Army soldiers who had not received such promotions became a major source of
trouble. At the same time, the inexperience of many senior officers, and the appointment of so many junior officers directly from the ranks, made it difficult to establish control over the great numbers of poorly trained new troops.
There was, however, an entirely different aspect to the problem of military discipline, which had little to do with the quality of soldiers or officers. What was often critically reported as troop arrogance or lack of discipline was actually a manifestation of an egalitarian spirit that had arisen within politicized revolutionary forces. In both Hubei and Hunan, soldiers and junior officers carried out revolutionary uprisings in defiance of their commanders. Revolutionary experience therefore rationalized the right of subordinates to challenge their superiors on political grounds. At the same time, many uprising participants were reluctant to accept the authority of new officers, especially non-revolutionary officers who had not participated in the uprisings. Thus, Hunan soldiers confronted officers attempting to restore discipline by saying, "We soldiers created the Republic in Hunan. What contribution did you officers make?" Taking pride in their own revolutionary achievements, such soldiers saw little reason to give these officers their obedience.
Joseph Esherick has noted that one aspect of this egalitarian spirit was a type of "soldiers' democracy." This phenomenon was largely an outgrowth of the system of elected revolutionary representatives that had developed within the Hubei and Hunan New Armies before the revolution. As previously noted, many of these representatives assumed the leadership of their units during revolutionary uprisings. In a number of cases, soldiers met to elect new commanders from among their unit representatives after the flight of their senior officers. In Hunan, a system of elected unit representatives was established outside the regular command structure. These representatives not only had direct access to the military governor but met to discuss the affairs of their units and expected their commanders to implement their decisions. The democratization of the military seen here may, as Joseph Esherick notes, have made the army into something of a "popular" revolutionary force. At the same time, this democratization clearly had a destabilizing effect on attempts to rebuild a military chain of command.
One later account cites two specific ways in which the spirit of "equality and freedom" that permeated Hubei's postrevolutionary army contributed to a lack of discipline. First, many units simply refused to accept officers appointed by the military governor or their di-
vision commanders, insisting instead on their own nominees. Second, unpopular or excessively strict officers soon found their subordinates plotting their removal. Many such cases occurred in the year after the revolution. For example, troops in Hunan's 3d Brigade refused to accept a new brigade commander, and only the timely intervention of a more popular commander saved the appointee from bodily harm. Wang Longzhong, commander of the Hunan 4th Division, sponsored plays and banquets for his troops to gain their support to resist a takeover of his command by the man who had been his superior before the revolution. Hunan's 3d Division mutinied at Yuezhou and imprisoned its commander, Zeng Jiwu, because of his supposed favoritism toward new recruits. In the end, Zeng was forced to resign, while a brigade commander who had actively supported the mutineers went unpunished. In March 1912, the troops of a Hubei engineering battalion turned against their commander (whom they had elected during the revolution) and his staff. The soldiers barred them from the camp and elected replacements—and this outcome had to be accepted by Li Yuanhong. There were, of course, many other cases where attempts to remove officers failed. But these incidents contributed to an atmosphere where no officer could really be secure in his post.
It is hardly surprising that professional military men such as Li Yuanhong, who saw discipline as essential for military efficiency, were concerned about the condition of postrevolutionary provincial armies. But there was more at stake than military efficiency. One overriding concern uniting most elite supporters of the provincial regimes was the maintenance of public order. Lack of discipline not only limited the army's capacity to preserve order, it made the army itself a potential source of disorder. The threat was increased by the fact that the politicized rank and file of the expanded provincial forces now represented a broader social stratum than the prerevolutionary New Armies. These forces thus posed a danger not only to the general public order but to the specific elite-based political order established in the new provincial regimes.