Manchurian Warlord and Republican General
The Japanese believed that Zhang Xueliang, who was known as a womanizer and an opium addict, would be much more subject to Japanese influence than was his father. An officer of the Japanese Kwantung Army therefore killed his father Zhang Zuolin by exploding a bomb above his train while it crossed under a railroad bridge. Surprisingly, the younger Zhang proved to be more independent than anyone had expected. With the assistance of William Henry Donald, he overcame his opium addiction and declared his support for Chiang Kai-shek. He was given the nickname of 千古功臣 (Hero of history) by PRC historians not because it was good that he was supporting the KMT, but because he wanted China to be reunited and was willing to pay the price and become "vice" leader of China. In order to rid his command of Japanese influence he had two prominent pro-Tokyo officials executed in front of the assembled guests at a dinner party in January 1929. It was a hard decision for him to make. The two had powers over the heads of others. Zhang also tried to eliminate Soviet influence from Manchuria, but relented in the face of a Soviet military build-up. At the same time, however, he developed closer relations with the United States.
In 1930, when warlords Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan attempted to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government, Zhang Xueliang stepped in to support the Nanjing government against the northern warlords in exchange for control of the key railroads in Hebei Province and the customs revenues from the port city of Tianjin. Following the Mukden Incident and the Japanese invasion of Zhang's own domain of Manchuria in 1931, Zhang's armies withdrew from the front lines without significant engagements. There has been speculation that Chiang Kai-Shek wrote a letter to Zhang asking him to pull his forces back, but later Zhang stated that he himself issued the orders. Apparently Zhang was aware of how weak his forces were compared to the Japanese, and wished to preserve his position by retaining a sizeable army. Nonetheless this would still be in line with Chiang's overall strategic standings. Zhang later traveled in Europe before returning to China to take command of the Communist Suppression Campaigns first in Hebei-Henan-Anhui and later in the Northwest.
Read more about this topic: Zhang Xueliang
Famous quotes containing the words republican and/or general:
“A man of great employments and excellent performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men should be held eligible who are under seventy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)