Yuan Shikai

Yuan Shikai commanded the best army in late Qing China, accepted the imperial abdication in 1912, became the first president of the republic and then tried to make himself emperor, which destroyed him in under a hundred days. He failed the civil-service examinations twice and made his career instead in Korea, where he was the Qing resident from 1885 and effectively ran the country until the war with Japan in 1894. He then built the Beiyang Army on German lines, the only modern force China possessed, and its officers became the warlords who ruled the country for the next fifteen years. He betrayed the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898 to the Empress Dowager Cixi, or so the reformers maintained, and was rewarded with governorships before being forced into retirement in 1909. The 1911 revolution brought him back because the court needed his army and the revolutionaries could not beat it: Sun Yat-sen stood aside from the presidency in his favour on condition that he secure the emperor's abdication, which he did in February 1912. He then dismantled the republic he headed - the parliamentary leader Song Jiaoren was assassinated in 1913 in a killing widely traced to his circle, the Kuomintang was banned, and parliament was dissolved. He accepted most of Japan's Twenty-One Demands in 1915, which was the single most damaging thing he did to his standing. He declared himself Emperor of the Chinese Empire in December 1915; provinces seceded, his own generals refused him, and he cancelled the monarchy in March 1916 and died of uraemia in June. The fragmentation of the army he had built is the usual starting point for the warlord era. His son Yuan Keding is generally blamed for feeding him a forged edition of a Beijing newspaper that showed public enthusiasm for the monarchy. Whether he believed it is unknowable, but he acted as though he did.

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