Feng Guozhang
Feng Guozhang was president of China for a year in which the office had no army, no treasury and no authority outside the capital. He was a professional soldier of the generation trained in the modernised army the Qing built after its defeat by Japan, and he rose in it as an instructor and a corps commander under the general who would become the republic's first strongman. When that man died in 1916 his army split into factions along the lines of its own training academies and provincial commands, and the decade that followed is known simply as the warlord period. Feng led one of the two largest factions. He became vice president in 1916 and president in July 1917, after a royalist general occupied Beijing and restored the last Qing emperor for twelve days before being bombed out of it by an aeroplane. The government Feng headed then took the decision the corpus narrates: in August 1917 China declared war on Germany, having already sent some hundred and forty thousand labourers to dig trenches and unload ships in France and Belgium, several thousand of whom died there. The calculation was that a seat at the peace conference would recover the German concessions in Shandong. It did not. The powers awarded them to Japan instead, on the strength of secret agreements and loans made to Feng's own premier, and the news brought students into the streets of Beijing on 4 May 1919 in the protest that gave a name to a generation and, indirectly, to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party two years later. Feng had been forced out of the presidency by his own faction the previous year and died months after the demonstrations, aged sixty.
- Lived: 1859 CE – 1919 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
