War and Geopolitics in Interwar Manchuria: Zhang Zuolin and the Fengtian Clique during the Northern Expedition, by Kwong Chi Man. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xiv+327 pp. US$119.00 (cloth and e-book)

, by Kwong Chi Man. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xiv+327 pp. US$119.00 (cloth and e-book).

The history of the Northern Expedition of 1926–28 has often been told from the Kuomintang's (KMT) point of view, framed as the inevitable victory of an ideologically fortified army against ragtag warlord forces. Kwong Chi Man convincingly questions this narrative by shifting the focus to a group who were defeated—Zhang Zuolin and his Fengtian Clique of allies who controlled northeast China.

Kwong poses three related questions, namely, (1) What goals did the Fengtian Clique pursue during its war with the KMT? (2) How was its strategy to achieve these goals influenced by Manchuria's exposed geopolitical position in northeast Asia? (3) How did the course of the war between the north and the south affect—and eventually ruin—their attempts to implement their strategy? Applying Colin Gray's concept of "strategic history," Kwong shows that the policies of Zhang Zuolin and his allies were as much shaped by the Northern Expedition's "political, socio-cultural, economic, technological, military-strategic, geographical and historical contexts" (9) as they were by "the actual conduct of warfare and the battles of armies" (10). Accordingly, Kwong asserts, the strategies and objectives of the northern warlords can only be fully understood if both the contexts and the course of the war are taken into account.

In order to make this point, the book's five chapters deal with Manchuria's exposed geopolitical location and the competing security and economic interests that resulted (chap. 1), the basis of Zhang Zuolin's power in Manchuria (chap. 2), the measures the Fengtian Clique took to strengthen their position in Manchuria and China proper (chap. 3), the military campaigns of their National Pacification Army (Anguojun) during the Northern Expedition (chap. 4), and the economic and fiscal side of Zhang Zuolin's war with the south (chap. 5).

In the first chapter, Kwong shows that Manchuria's institutional and social integration into the Republic of China was not as strong as is often retrospectively asserted. Furthermore, by the late nineteenth century the region had already become a hotbed of competing interests: Russia and Japan strove for hegemony by military and economic means, and after 1911, the local elites had become divided over whether Manchuria should strive for more or less involvement with China. As Kwong argues in chapter 2, Zhang Zuolin's claim to power was closely related to his ability to balance these competing forces.

In chapter 3 Kwong shows how, in the 1920s, this continuous balancing act affected the military operations of Zhang and his allies, notably Zhang Zongchang and Sun Chuanfang. They must not alienate the local elites by overburdening the Manchurian economy, and they must remain mindful of the strong Japanese and Russian military presence at Manchuria's borders. (Throughout the book, however, the Russian influence gets noticeably less examined than Japan's.) As Kwong makes clear, their decision to enter into war against the KMT in 1926 signified the Fengtian Clique's entry into the arena of Chinese national politics—a move that added further pressure on them. While they suggested a different path to national unification than did the KMT—by means of negotiation, not annihilation of the enemy—they had to strive for foreign support of their plans. But due to their reputation as "warlords," the Fengtian Clique found it difficult to garner sufficient support to seriously work toward their plan's actualization.

Still, as traced in chapter 4, it was mainly military defeats, not a less attractive political program or image problems, that prevented the Clique's vision of a negotiated reunification of China from becoming true. A host of "strategic and operational errors ... , poor decision-making, intelligence failures, and faulty command and control" (143) doomed Zhang's war efforts. Another decisive factor in the Fengtian Clique's defeat was the progressive deterioration of its financial base in Manchuria, as Kwong argues in chapter 5. From early on Zhang lacked access to sufficient funds to finance his war. In order to overcome this weakness, Kwong asserts, the Clique decided to make use of the state bank of Fengtian (Liaoning) to mobilize all Manchurian resources in a concerted effort to swiftly gain military control of north China. The reasoning behind this plan was that Chinese and foreign support would be forthcoming as soon as the upper hand had been gained in the struggle with the KMT. However, the effort ultimately failed.

Kwong convincingly untangles and analyzes the host of interrelated needs, interests, and desires that affected each and every action of Zhang Zuolin and his allies. It was neither the purported lack of ideology nor inferior military capabilities (the Fengtian Army was, in fact, a highly effective organization) that brought about their defeat, but countless sociopolitical constraints and too many mistakes, failures, and defeats on the battlefields. The Fengtian Clique had to sue for peace with the KMT in 1928.

Kwong has come to his conclusions by conducting research using a corpus of primary sources that have hitherto hardly been tapped, most notably a group of handwritten manuscripts that deal with the Northern Expedition from the north's perspective. These manuscripts had been prepared for publication in Wenshi ziliao, but they were not published or only in heavily redacted form. In addition, Kwong has delved deeply into various foreign archives, notably the digital archive of the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (Ajia Rekishi Kenkyū Sentā). By examining the events of the Northern Expedition from the side of those who were defeated, Kwong has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of this crucial period in China's republican history.