Civil Government in Warlord China: Tradition, Modernization and Manchuria. (Book Reviews).

CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN WARLORD CHINA: Tradition, Modernization and Manchuria. By Ronald Suleski. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. 2002. xvi, 302 pp. US$63.95, cloth. ISBN 0-8204-5278-5.

Warlords have a bad name. They behave badly, they swagger, they rob and plunder, they fight senseless wars. National governments and armies hate them because they accept no authority. Civilian populations hate them because their military ambitions always take precedence over the interests of civilian society. But the existence of warlords is not a product of their own venality; rather, they are the product of the collapse of a national government.

China's warlord period was one of the darkest of her modern history. The conventional wisdom was to blame the ills of the period on the warlords themselves. More recently, in China, Taiwan and abroad, the trend has been not to label the warlords as evil, but to see them in the context of their times. Much research has been done in China, usually by regional historians, to bring some of the warlords in from the cold. In this new climate, Ronald Suleski's perceptive study of Manchuria - and its most famous son, Zhang Zuolin - is a major and welcome addition.

Suleski's book covers Zhang's extraordinary career, from his rise from the bandit world to his death in a train explosion. In the interim, Zhang came to dominate a vast area, as large as Europe, teeming with natural resources - China's new frontier. He held at bay two greedy foreign imperialist powers, Russia and China; he oversaw the settlement of an almost empty land; and he helped to lay the foundations of Manchuria's industrial economy.

He did not do any of this on his own. One of the most valuable aspects of Suleski's book is his description of the men who worked with Zhang - and sometimes against him - especially the gifted Wang Yongjiang, Zhang's chief of finance. Again, conventional wisdom, which holds that no decent Chinese ever worked for a warlord, but instead worked for one of the national political movements, is overturned. In fact, all over China government offices were filled with men who worked for regional power-holders - i.e., warlords. Some of them were very effective; in the 1920s and 1930s, several of the regions of China had better government than regions under 'national' governments, for example Shanxi under Yan Xishan, Guangxi under the Guangxi Clique, and Manchuria under Zhang Zuolin.

Suleski sees Wang and other civilian officials as Manchuria's unsung heroes, the men who gave the region financial and administrative stability. Beyond recognizing Wang Yongjiang's achievements, however, Suleski shows the fundamental conflict between warlordism and civilian government: the activities of civilian officials could always be thwarted by warlords with their insatiable demands for money to support their armies. This is what happened to Wang Yongjiang. Zhang Zuolin's demands - mainly to support his military adventures outside Manchuria, within the Pass (China Proper) - led to a breakdown in the relationship between the two men. Wang died soon after the breach, too soon to see the retribution that fell upon Zhang. In his ambitions within the Pass, he forgot the Japanese, with whom Zhang had a complex relationship. In 1928 they blew up his train, killing him and most of his senior military advisors. The Japanese are not the focus of this book, but they are there like ghosts, looming behind Zhang, supp orting him at times but ultimately destroying him.

This is a lively, well-written book; it conveys the drama of Zhang's life, and shows his immense talents. The book also shows how crucial uncorrupt financial administration is for any regime to function well and to endure. Huang's achievement - made possible by Zhang's recognition that corruption was a form of slow suicide for a regime - serves as a salutary reminder for other governments.