Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China by Kate Merkel-Hess

Kate Merkel-Hess’s vivid and smartly crafted study inverts received understandings of the warlord era in several ways. Rather than focusing on the singular and often quirkily perverse and cruel personalities of individual warlords and the death and destruction they produced, she concentrates our gaze on their wives, concubines, and daughters. The social prominence these women enjoyed was largely due to their connection with powerful militarists, yet Mme Yan Xishan, Guo Dejie, Li Dequan, and the other elite women chronicled here were not, contrary to received narratives, politically or socially insignificant or mere instruments of their spouse or father’s cupidity. Merkel-Hess directs us to consider that many prominent warlord women were formidable political operators, influential social activists, and/or prominent media figures whose public and private lives were well-reported and photographically documented. As such, they were celebrated for their own endeavors, which often bolstered the warlord’s standing as a consequential national leader. Women and Their Warlords examines some dozen key protagonists, warlord wives, concubines, daughters, and their warlords, as well as various others such as Mme and Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek (not a warlord, but a militarist political leader). The book thus contributes significantly to important recent scholarship by Xia Shi and others in examining the process and effects of women’s increasing presence and prominence in the public realm during the Republican era. It also provokes readers to reconsider the place of warlords and militarism in twentieth-century China.

When Mme Yan Xishan began to attract media attention in 1928, other than being “talented and kind-hearted, hardworking and thrifty,” nothing else of her personality was known or sufficiently of interest to appear in the press (p. 21). Mme Yan’s renown continued nonetheless, due to the vicissitudes of her husband, General Yan Xishan, as ruler of Shanxi Province. A modernizing conservative, the general advocated for women’s rights to support their primary roles as wives and mothers, as well as the promotion of public health and compulsory education. These initiatives were sometimes controversial, so Mme Yan’s support for these causes may have been calculated to bolster popular support for them and to soften her husband’s image. Viewed from this angle, Mme Yan emerges as a significant political and social actor while remaining somewhat anonymous. According to contemporary press convention, elite wives, primary and secondary, were identified as furen, that is, Mme. Given that General Yan, like many elite men, had both a primary and secondary wife, that is, a concubine, “Mme Yan’s” identity remained unclear until 1934, when secondary wife Xu Lansen appeared in photographs and news reports as “Mme Yan,” with Mme Chiang Kai-shek (Song Meiling) to promote the New Life Movement. It is difficult to know whether “Mme Yan” had previously denoted Yan’s primary wife, Xu Zhiqing, and only later referred to Xu Lansen in particular. Or, perhaps, “Mme Yan” indicated Xu Lansen throughout. If so, Mme Yan’s public profile would support Xia Shi’s contention that during the early Republic, public appearances were often undertaken by concubines, while primary wives, enjoying a more licit, elevated status, often preferred to be hidden from public gaze. In any case, Mme Yan and other warlord wives were similar in status to Song Meiling, the archetype of China’s “first lady.” Indeed, their husbands at times wielded equal, if not greater, power as national leaders than Chiang Kai-shek, giving them tenable claim to the title of “first lady.” As such, the individual and collective activities of warlord wives established a robust and varied profile for politically adept and active wives as “first lady.”

Guo Dejie, the public partner and secondary wife of Guangxi militarist Li Zongren, exemplified a new pattern of male–female equality based on the complementarity of women’s and men’s proper social roles. From the Northern Expedition through WWII and beyond, Guo endorsed Li’s militarist ethos and urged the women of Guangxi and the greater nation to mobilize on the front lines and the home front to carry out propaganda, nursing, entertaining the troops, and food and industrial production to support men on the battlefield. Guo expounded on her belief that women’s wartime participation was imperative to assure Chinese victory and establish women’s equality with men in the monthly magazine Guangxi Women, which was established in 1940 by the provincial New Life Movement. Though equal, men and women differed essentially: Guo, like many Guomindang (GMD) feminists, supported a quota system to reserve seats in the National Assembly for women, who were assumed to be at a disadvantage in elections in which they competed against male candidates. A true politician, Li established a group, the Beiping Women’s Association, as a vehicle to support her bid as a delegate from Beiping in the 1947 general election. Her victory, like those of many others, may have benefited from campaign irregularities, yet it allowed her to cast a vote in support of Li Zongren, who won the vice presidency in 1948. Guo and Li’s political and personal lives took a dramatic turn when, having gone to the USA for medical treatment in 1949 and then residing in New Jersey, the couple and their son defected to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1966. Their return to mainland China seems to have been more due to melancholy and anomie stemming from their irrelevance to politics and society in the USA than enthusiasm for Mao’s New Society, though their flight caused consternation in both the USA and the Republic of China (ROC).

Other warlord women departed even further from the received notion that warlords and their associates were necessarily supporters of reaction and chaos. At a Nanjing 1936 International Women’s Day event, we encounter a surprisingly eloquent and persuasive “northern village granny” who turns out to be thirty-nine-year-old Li Dequan, a former Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) secretary and the wife of the “Christian General” Feng Yuxiang (p. 73). A mother of four and stepmother of five and a formidable partner to Feng, who advocated for women’s healthcare, female participation in the war effort, and leftist politics that by the war’s end were increasingly critical of Chiang Kai-shek and sympathetic to the USSR, Li exemplified the virtuous “good wife and wise mother” and activist free thinking Christian socialist. After 1949, she simultaneously served as the PRC’s first minister of health and head of the Chinese Red Cross, personifying a vibrant model of New Society femininity at home and abroad.

Depending on one’s perspective, Fu Dong, the daughter of Fu Zuoyi, a militarist active in Inner Mongolia, exemplified Communist conviction and filial devotion or treason and familial betrayal. Aware of his daughter’s leftist sympathies, Fu Zuoyi suspected that his daughter, a journalist at Dagongbao, was a Communist Party member. He was unaware, until later, that she was informing the Party of his activities as she endeavored (successfully) to persuade her father to surrender his forces and allow the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to occupy Beijing unopposed. Merkel-Hess provides a coda to Li’s and Fu’s bold activism by noting that late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century interpretations of the Warlord and overall Republican era have tamed their radicalism. In line with the contemporary revival of traditionalist gender politics and family values, Li has become an avatar of wifely and motherly devotion, not an independent activist. Fu, in turn, is characterized less as a revolutionary woman than as a filial daughter devoted equally to family and state.

The final chapter investigates the well-known post-Xi’an Incident ordeal of Zhang Xueliang, who endured a half century of house arrest in Taiwan before being liberated to spend his last years in Hawai‘i. Throughout his decades of detention, he enjoyed the constancy of his second wife, Zhao Yidi, who was at liberty to leave whenever she chose, and the friendship of Song Meiling, as well as Chiang Ching-kuo. (The amity of the two Chiang family members was insufficient to release Zhang from his gratuitously long and vindictive confinement. Such are marital deference and filial piety.) Merkel-Hess provides a sensitive portrait of the emotional and political bonds among these principals and chronicles shifts in the public understanding of Zhang’s kidnapping of Chiang and his captivity. Since Zhao and Zhang’s deaths in 2000 and 2001, as well as the posthumous 2014 publication of Eileen Chang’s novel The Young Marshal the pair have been celebrated as embodying “love beyond convention and patriotism beyond politics” (p. 149).

In sum, this tightly plotted and, at times, unexpectedly moving study simultaneously contributes to and incites the further reconsideration of the warlord era and militarism, not as aberrant departures from the development of China as an increasingly democratic and modern nation, but as integral components of modern political and social history. Power does, after all, grow out of the barrel of a gun, especially in a society that had been armed to the teeth since, depending on one’s perspective, the mid- or late-nineteenth century. While the warlord period ended definitively in 1949, the leaders of the ROC and PRC continued to be seasoned military commanders who celebrated the nation’s and their own personal military prowess until the mid-1970s.

As Merkel-Hess cannily demonstrates, their collective reputation for brutality and mayhem notwithstanding, China’s militarists were always domesticated, and their female relations, for better and for worse, contributed greatly to their political and military activities. The book underscores how the very exercise of political influence by these women tested orthodox gender, political, and societal mores and thus, irrespective of their political orientation, promoted modern female liberation. At the same time, as intimates of military satraps who challenged both the GMD and the Chinese Communist Party for regional and national primacy, these women embodied the destabilization of home and the central state, as well as the possibility of unrealized alternative configurations of national power. Nonetheless, as Merkel-Hess skillfully highlights, recent historical narratives unleashed by nostalgic fascination for the Republican period have “domesticated” these figures by reinterpreting them as homogenized, dedicated husbands and wives, denuded of their military or revolutionary ambition. Women and Their Warlords is a good read and will reward all scholars, students, and general readers interested in the gender, social, and political history of the Warlord Era and the greater Republican Period.