Many of you probably know a little bit about the history of early modern China—the fall of the Qing dynasty, the civil war, and the foundation of today’s China. Yet there’s more to the story of China’s path to socialism.

Chinese warlords may be a familiar term for some, and for me as well, yet for the longest time I only knew that they existed, not much about who they were, or what they did. A while ago I finally decided to pick up a book written by Lai Xinxia on this period of history. He is a very reliable scholar—after participating in the Chinese revolution he was assigned to sorting the archives of the Beiyang era, and over fifty years gradually improved his draft until publishing the final edition of his book, “History of the Beiyang Warlords”, in 2004. I have made a summary of it here to educate more people, something I have not spent as much time doing as I should have.

First, a definition. The Chinese term for a single warlord group is 系, which can translate to system, line, etc. The generally accepted english translation for this is ‘clique’, which I will use here. The english translations for the clique names seem to be based on location (province names) rather than abbreviations commonly used in Chinese. I will be using the Chinese versions here since I’m too lazy to find the english translations for all of them.

After the opium wars, many Qing officials realized the importance of self-strengthening and creating a modern army. Li Hongzhan, one of the many han officials who rose to prominence in the last years of the Qing empire, created his own army, the Xiangjun, with modern equipment and training methods. Eventually this unit proved instrumental in defeating the Taiping rebellion, and for a time there was hope within the empire that expanding the ‘new army’ would lead to the empire being able to resist foreigners and establish its sovereignty. The Empire also created two foreign affairs departments, Beiyang (north sea) and Nanyang (south sea) respectively. As an important Beiyang civil servant, Li Hongzhang was the forerunner of the powerful warlords who would come to control vast portions of China in the first few decades of the coming century.

Yet without changing society, the new armies soon fell to corruption, and by the time Japan declared the Jiawu war the Beiyang Fleet, a modernized fleet the Qing government had established, was largely corrupted, ineffectual, and quickly defeated by Japan despite strong patriotism and determined resistance by patriotic soldiers and officers alike.

Yuan Shikai was at this time only a minor officer, who at some point was stationed in Korea. Despite a minor incident in which he was reported to the government, many praised his effective training of his own army, with some westerners remarking that China would be saved if they had more units like his. Yet during the invasion of China by the eight powers, instead of going into battle he decided to withdraw to preserve his own strength, with the result that he took almost no losses while his sister units of the new army were completely crushed. After the ordeal, he then escorted Cixi back to the forbidden city, and won the affection of many in government with this action. One thing to note is that in 1895 Yuan Shikai began conducting military drills in Xiaozhan (little station) near Beijing, which many scholars consider to be the beginning of the Beiyang era.

In 1911 the Xinhai revolution erupted and the imperial system which had existed in China for millennia was overthrown. While this was a bourgeoisie revolution, it nonetheless pushed history forward greatly in China. Yet at this point many of the revolutionaries were politically naive, including Sun Zhongshan, the leader of the new Republic of China, and believed that their country could not succeed without existing figures of authority in government. This, combined with Sun’s own lack of political experience, led to the new government electing Yuan Shikai as its first official president. The Tongmenghui, Sun’s revolutionary party, decided to engage in parliamentary politics, and slowly began to lose its revolutionary characteristic.

Yuan was not content with merely being president and being constrained by the majority-tongmenghui (which around this time had rebranded itself as the Guomindang, ‘party of the national people’) parliament. So after a few years of rule and forcing through laws that increasingly gave him power, he finally declared himself emperor of the Chinese Empire and disbanded parliament. Before this, he had also secretly signed a humiliating treaty with Japan to win support secretly in 1915. This will become important later…

Yuan’s move was met with opposition from almost everyone in China, even including monarchists, who wanted the former Qing empire on the throne. His own subjects were also unhappy, as their potential position as Yuan’s successor was now only available to his children. After a few short months Yuan died from sickness, and democracy returned. Yet…

During Yuan’s monarchy, Sun Zhongshan had advocated for a Second Revolution. Working in the south and gathering the support of revolutionaries and local warlords, he managed to establish a southern government. Yet he controlled very few armies himself, with only a few fleets in the navy supporting him. Most of the armies fighting for the southern republic were warlords who only opposed Yuan for their own gain and cared little for progress in China.

In the North, after Yuan’s death splits began to appear in the previously cohesive Beiyang bloc. The Wan clique, led by Duan Qirui, and the Zhi clique, lead by Feng Guozhang. While Duan advocated for using force to unify China and defeat the southern government, Feng wanted a peaceful reunification, more because he was opposed to Duan than any other reason. To resolve their conflict, they appointed a third party, Li Yuanhong to take on the role of the president of China.

At this point, Zhang Xun, a staunch monarchist, led his army into Beijing with the pretext of mediating a negotiation between the Wan and Zhi cliques. Instead, he seized power with his ‘pigtail army’ and promptly reestablished the Qing empire, with the child emperor Puyi (who had been treated well and allowed to stay in the forbidden city by the revolutionaries) as its leader.

Of course this did not last long, with all the Beiyang warlords coming to oppose him. Duan Qirui gave himself the title of creating democarcy three times with his defeating of Zhang Xun, and the Wan clique at this point became the dominant player on the Beiyang stage. Yet the country was still divided into north and south, and tensions between the two cliques were growing more heated by the day.

(part 1 concluded)

In the past few months, “overcapacity” has become the key theme among Western politicians looking to fight back against China’s dominance in energy transition sectors.

"Overcapacity" is a tool of memetic warfare used by the Group of Imperialists who are so detached from reality that they believe China will just stop developing because they asked... and not even nicely

Sustainable Aviation Fuel is another large future market for Green Hydrogen.

Contrary to aerodyne lobby propaganda, airplanes aren't the only flying mode of transportation that can use green hydrogen

Western countries always complain about China dominating green energy supply chain. Okay, then don’t buy the machines that produce green energy. China can use its own machines to generate green energy and ship that to you.

Wrong. America will put sanctions on Chinese hydrogen to ensure another couple degrees of warming. Then they'll sabotage the Pan-Eurasian Hydrogen Pipeline. Assuming the Pacific Fleet doesn't get sunk before then, of course

China’s PPP GDP is only 25% larger than that of the US? Come on people… who are we kidding? Last year, China generated twice as much electricity as the US, produced 12.6 times as much steel and 22 times as much cement. China’s shipyards accounted for over 50% of the world’s output while US production was negligible. In 2023, China produced 30.2 million vehicles, almost three times more than the 10.6 million made in the US.

On the demand side, 26 million vehicles were sold in China last year, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the US. Chinese consumers bought 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the US. As a country, China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much seafood as the US. Chinese shoppers spent twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers.

In 2023, Chinese travelers took 620 million flights, 25% fewer than the 819 million flights taken by Americans, but Chinese travelers also took 3 billion trips on high-speed rail (and 685 million on traditional rail), significantly more than the 28m Amtrak trips.

It’s not that we think the World Bank has done a bad job. It’s that we believe China’s NBS, contrary to popular opinion, has been lowballing GDP for decades and the World Bank has to work within the confines of the NBS’s reported data. This was politically important decades ago for WTO concessions and it is politically important today to maintain developing economy status as China makes a play for leadership of the Global South.

We believe China’s GDP and PPP GDP are lowballed by an incomplete transition from the Material Product System (MPS) of national accounts, which excludes services by design. The World Bank is likely dutifully doing its sums with goods consumption in China multiples of the US but measuring services consumption as a fraction of the US.

China’s NBS stood its ground on a conceptual level. Rightly or wrongly, the Leninist MPS considers services necessary costs of material production rather than real value creation. In China’s first attempt at converting MPS to SNA in 1985, it tacked on a ludicrously low 13% to the MPS number and called it China’s services GDP.

Adherence to UNSNA [United Nations System of National Accounts] has caused a breakdown in the meaning of GDP. As necessary services become an ever larger share of Western economies, their growth does not appear to result in discernable improvements in living standards.

Are US healthcare and universities twice as good as they were in the year 2000? If US households have not gotten vastly improved healthcare, education, housing and childcare over the past two decades, then inflation has been systematically underreported and GDP growth may have, in fact, been less than 1% per annum (instead of 2%), which equals stagnation given 0.8% per annum population growth. This may go a long way in explaining popular anger and the meltdown of American politics.

China's economy is much larger than everyone says it is (and America's economy is much smaller), but it's beneficial to keep up this ruse. 韬光养晦