Yuan Shikai
The general who ended the Chinese empire, hijacked the republic that replaced it, tried to make himself emperor, and left China to the warlords.
Yuan Shikai is the answer to a question that puzzles people about modern China: how did the world's oldest empire fall in 1911 and produce, not a republic, but forty years of warlords, civil war, and revolution? Because the man who midwifed the republic owned the only real army in the country and used it for himself.
He failed the imperial examinations twice and went into the army instead, which turned out to be the growth industry. He made his name in Korea in the 1880s and 1890s as the Qing resident who ran Seoul as a Chinese protectorate. After China's humiliating defeat by Japan in 1895 he was given the job of building a modern force on Western lines, and he built the Beiyang Army: German drill, foreign instructors, modern artillery, and an officer corps that Yuan personally selected, promoted, and paid. Its loyalty was to him, not to the throne. That detail decided the next twenty years of Chinese history.
The empire's last servant
Yuan's method was to be indispensable to whoever was winning. In 1898 the young Guangxu Emperor launched the Hundred Days reform and looked to Yuan for military backing; Yuan sided with the Empress Dowager Cixi, and the reform was crushed. He rose steadily afterward, ran the most effective provincial administration in the empire, and was pushed into retirement in 1909 by a regent who understood exactly how dangerous he had become.
Then came the Wuchang uprising of October 1911. The court, with its southern provinces declaring independence one after another, had no one else to call. Yuan came back on his own terms, took command, and promptly negotiated with both sides at once. He extracted the abdication of the boy emperor Puyi in February 1912, ending two thousand years of imperial rule, and simultaneously extracted the presidency of the new republic from the revolutionaries, who had no army and knew it. Sun Yat-sen stood aside for him.
The republic that wasn't
What followed was a masterclass in dismantling a constitution. China's first real parliamentary elections, in late 1912, were won by Sun's Nationalists; their brilliant young organizer Song Jiaoren was shot dead at a Shanghai railway station in March 1913, almost certainly on orders traceable to Yuan's circle. When the Nationalists rose against him that summer in the Second Revolution, the Beiyang Army crushed them in two months. Yuan then banned the party, dissolved parliament, and rewrote the constitution to give himself something close to lifetime rule.
He also accepted the bulk of Japan's Twenty-One Demands in 1915, trading Chinese sovereignty for foreign acquiescence in his position, which cost him the nationalist credibility he had left.
The last emperor of China
In December 1915 Yuan overreached spectacularly and declared the monarchy restored with himself as the Hongxian Emperor, reign to begin on New Year's Day 1916. The reaction was universal contempt. Provinces revolted in what became the National Protection War, his own Beiyang generals declined to fight for him, and after eighty-three days he canceled the whole thing. He died that June, aged fifty-six, a broken man.
The wreckage outlived him by a decade. The Beiyang Army had cohered around one person, and when that person died it fractured into rival cliques whose commanders spent the 1920s fighting each other for provinces and railways. Historians date the warlord era from Yuan's death. His real legacy is a lesson every fragile republic relearns: it is not the constitution that decides whether a country has one, it is who the soldiers obey. The Chinese Communist Party that eventually won China learned that lesson thoroughly, and has kept the army answering to the party ever since.