In both English and Chinese, the term warlord, or junfa, immediately conjures the image of a rapacious strongman, violent and reactionary. The territorial aggrandizement of these military men nipped Chinese democracy in the bud, contributing to the fragmentation and instability of the Republican period (1912-1949). But the warlords who vied for power after the final dynasty’s collapse were also husbands, fathers, and friends. By centering the women in their lives, Kate Merkel-Hess’s Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China, revisits the history and memory of a dynamic era and highlights the political valences of intimate relationships.
The five chapters of the book have a biographical and chronological structure. Making the most of scant evidence, chapter one presents a composite portrait of women married to militarists during the heyday of warlord power in the 1910s and 20s. Chapters two and three focus on the public lives and women’s advocacy of Guo Dejie, who was married to the Guangxi warlord Li Zongren, and Li Dequan, wife of “Christian General” Feng Yuxiang. Both women played active roles in politics across the 1949 divide. Chapters four and five explore post-Mao era remembrances of Fu Dong, a journalist and a militarist’s daughter, and Zhao Yidi, the second wife of Zhang Xueliang, the warlord scion and onetime playboy and opium addict known as “the Young Marshal.” Zhang Xueliang’s friendship with Song Meiling, or Madame Chiang Kai-shek, is also examined.
Throughout these five chapters, much of the focus is on image-making and public consumption of media, including news coverage of militarist families, the public writing of women, and retrospective accounts. Women helped “domesticate” warlords, softening and even rehabilitating their images. In turn, these women were themselves domesticated, reinscribed into narratives that emphasized their roles as wife or daughter, marginalizing their independent accomplishments. It is hard to break that mold, even in this review. Discussing a book titled Women and Their Warlords, I am compelled to introduce Li Dequan as the wife of Feng Yuxiang, and not as, for instance, a head of the Chinese Red Cross.
Person-centered histories, like those of this book, usefully disrupt conventional periodization. Warlords cannot be contained in their eponymous Warlord Era (1916-1928), for they remained politically and militarily active during the Nanjing Decade, the war with Japan, and even as PRC bureaucrats. In other cases, warlords attracted political controversy despite their growing obsolescence. Underscoring these points is a valuable contribution of this book, which is thematically focused on women with militarist family ties, but chronologically focused on the 1940s and later, not a timeframe typically associated with warlords.
Nevertheless, Merkel-Hess bookends her book with some big claims about Republican China writ large. Citing Frank Dikötter’s characterization of the Republican period as an “age of openness,” she contends:
Militarist women participated in the openness of the Republican period—as did their warlords. By widening the lens on militarism’s effects to include militarist-affiliated women and families, we can see that the disintegration it supposedly engendered is not a complete story of militarism’s influence on Republican China or perhaps even a useful one. Telling the story of Chinese warlordism as one of fragmentation overlooks how militarists and their close circles influenced the Republic’s vigorous political debates and cultural transformations and how the disunity of the period created space for experimentation.
There is a mismatch here. The disintegration “supposedly engendered” by warlord competition was most pronounced before Chiang Kai-shek rose to power, while the evidence of the book comes from later decades. Because of Merkel-Hess’s chronology and her focus on biographical case studies, the issue of representativeness inevitably arises. What can and can’t these women tell us about a three-decades long Republican period, and what counterevidence goes unexamined, for surely some wives and concubines of warlords lived cloistered lives?
In the book’s introduction, Merkel-Hess acknowledges the disruptive impact of warlords. “Warlord conflicts created instability and suffering, particularly in rural areas, bringing famine, sexual violence, crime, dislocation, and economic disruption to the common people.” In the chapters that follow, the inherent violence of warlords receives little attention, and it goes unmentioned in the conclusion. The warlords have indeed been domesticated, not just by the women of their families, but by the historian.