From The Management Of Hunan To The Scourge Of Hunan

In the early Republic of China, the northern army group dominated all the affairs inside and outside the country and controls both the central government and the local government. The description of the age of the northern army group was dark and the research on it was stagnant. In the recent years, many scholars have got some achievements, but they were not enough to reflect the original facts of history.In the early Republic of China, Hunan was a typical area of warlordism and also a crucial region of connecting the important roads in northern and southern China. This thesis will take an elaborate case study to clear the political and military activities with the history of Zhang Jing-yao’s government of Hunan as a beginning. It will also act as a key to the interpretation of the northern faction and have a reflection on its ultimate fate. All the studies will enrich Hunan local history, the Northern Warlords’history, and even the Northern Warlords’age.April,1918, Zhang Jing-yao posted as both the governor and the warlord in Hunan and left it in June after2years. As a governor, Zhang Jing-yao rectified to reassure social order and gave a relief, recovered the bad notes and reconstructed the banks, and made orders to protect business and revitalize industries.He made all these measures to solve the livelihood, revivify the tax and stabilize the situation. As a warlord, he required that the police patrol, suppress bandits, coordinate all the efforts and rectify disciplines. Besides that, he reinforced the defense through the distribution of the army around Hunan to lay the foundation of suppressing the insurgency of southwest China. However, before Zhang Jing-yao came to Hunan, the whole province was in financial deficit with complaints everywhere. Though there existed multiple plans after he arrived Hunan, he tried to solve this by selling the rice, mines, and cotton mills. He made efforts to relieve the crisis, but only little effects have been achieved. Therefore, he was cursed. Multilateral forces, like the great military stress, the dark struggle between Zhixi warlords and Wanxi warlords and the expelling by the Hunanese, all drove Zhang Jing-yao out of Hunan being defeated.The key point to reveal the internal contradictions and the plight of the Northern era was how to evaluate Zhang Jing-yao from objective environment, his own subjective errors and so as to dig out the reason why he brought disasters to Hunan. In fact, it was undoubted that Zhang Jing-yao acted as the supporting role of the warlords’strife due to the central government’s lack of core strength which could lead and control the whole country and the warlords’trapping into local disputes and separatist state. To end the chaos of warlord strife, to achieve the reunification of the whole country so that the central government could control the country had become a serious and urgent need in that era.