Portrait of General Zhang Zuolin in the 1920s. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

In 1928, Chieh Chien Chang became the only college student of the village and attended the Fengtian(today’s Shenyang)-based Northeastern University, a prosperous institution created by Zhang Zuolin, a bandit-turned-warlord and de facto ruler of Manchuria. The year Dr. Chang enrolled in Northeastern, General Zhang Zuolin was murdered by the Japanese military leaders in a covert campaign against him.

In the context of modern Chinese history, the word warlord, or junfa (军阀), is historically specific to the militarists who exercised military, political, and economic control over massive territories in China during the 1910s and 1920s. Most warlords gained military might as career soldiers during or after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. The “Warlord Era” started around 1916, when the autocratic president of China Yuan Shikai died in the disgrace of trying to restore monarchy in the country, and officially ended in 1928, when China was nominally unified under the Nationalist government in Nanjing.

Although Chinese warlords prioritized military achievements over civil development and waged devastating wars in a politically fragmented country, many contributed to the modernization of the region under their rule, including the modernization of education. The Northeastern University, which focused on science and technology, was among the several warlord-funded colleges established in the 1920s nationwide. Out of their own political calculation and a national passion for educational modernization in Chinese society, warlords generally gave these colleges the relative academic independence they deserved as emulators of the universities in Europe and America. The Northeastern University distinguished itself in its ability to attract top scholars, such as the University of Pennsylvania-trained architect Liang Sicheng. But, as in the case of its peers, the university’s financial well-being often suffered from the whims of the warlords.

In American history, there was no one comparable with these warlords, although in a separate context, the English word “war-lord” was probably first coined by an American writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an 1856 essay on the aristocracy in Britain. The modern usage of “warlord,” however, did not exist until the late 1910s. Historians have traced the Chinese characters “军阀(junfa)” back to similar characters in Japanese publications of the 1910s. In Japan, the characters had referred to a class of military leaders who gained supremacy in Japanese politics after the Russo-Japanese War. In China, an early Communist leader and intellectual, Chen Duxiu, first borrowed the characters and used the word junfa to describe the Chinese militarists in an article on December 28, 1918. The translation of junfa as “warlord” gained strength and was widely used in the English-speaking world after the First World War, although the Bolsheviks in Russia soon appropriated this term to stigmatize white generals during the Russian Civil War. In conclusion, the word “warlord” as we understand it today originated from Chinese history of the 1910s and 1920s.

General Zhang was briefly the nominal leader of China, from June 1927 to the following June. He fled the capital city of Beijing in order to survive his defeat by the Nationalist forces under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek but met with a more formidable enemy on his way back home. He was mortally wounded by a Japanese bomb set under a railway bridge near Fengtian and died shortly afterwards.