Li Yuanhong was an army officer who rose quickly to prominence in the early days of the republic, twice served as president during the period of warlordism.
Background
Li Yuanhong was born in 1864 in Huangpi, Hubei province, in central China, not far from Wuchang, the site of the 1911 Revolution, in which he was forced to become a reluctant leader. His father was an army officer who took part in the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion and young Li apparently aspired to a military career as well.
Education
After finishing classical preparatory school in his hometown, he was sent to northern China to attend the Naval Academy in Tianjin, where he spent six formative years of his life as a cadet. During those years, he not only went through a rigid curriculum in military science taught by Western instructors, he also became quite Westernized, versed in the English language and embracing Christianity. After graduating from the Naval Academy, he served briefly as chief engineer officer on a modern cruiser, but lost his job when his ship was sunk during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895.
Career
Soon after the war, he began to work for Zhang Zhidong, the viceroy (zhongdu) at Wuhan and one of the powerful regional leaders in China, training the new army with the aid of a German instructor. Later, he was sent to Japan for two years of further military training. He advanced quickly in the ensuing years, becoming commander of the Infantry Fourth Advance Guard in 1903 and of the Second Division in 1905. When the new army was organized in the following year, he was promoted to a colonel in command of the elitist Twenty-first Mixed Brigade, the new army unit that was heavily infiltrated by the revolutionaries. Li's attitude toward the revolutionaries was mixed: He appeared to be somewhat tolerant of them as long as they were not operating in an overt way.
When the revolution broke out in October 1911, with no leader of recognizable status on the scene, many organizers regarded Li to be the most suitable to assume command of the revolutionary forces in order to rally support from other parts of China. While Li was liberal and reform-minded compared to other military commanders, he was far from being a revolutionary. According to Edwin Dingle, a resident of Hankou who worked for the China Press at the time, Li did not seem to have much choice, for Mabove his neck glistened half a dozen narrow swords” held by the revolutionaries.
After acceding to the demand of the leaders of the uprising, Li quickly rose to prominence riding the tidal wave that was to sweep the Qing dynasty from power. He became military governor (dudu) of the newly independent Hubei province and de facto leader of the revolution as 14 provinces (out of 18 in the nation) declared independence of the Qing dynasty in the first six weeks of the revolution. He began issuing proclamations in the name of the military government, abolishing the traditional practice of counting the year by the reign of the sitting emperor to signify the ending of the dynastic rule. He also sent out invitations to military governors of other independent provinces to come to Hankou for a meeting to organize a constitutional government of the new republic.
Meanwhile, Li began to espouse revolutionary ideals in great clarity and even tried to persuade Yuan Shikai to join the revolutionary side. In an interview with the China Press on November 20, 1911, in all probability the first extensive interview given by any revolutionary leaders,Li told of his vision for a new China. He wanted China to be a republic ruled by the Chinese with a constitutional government based on the American system, rejecting British constitutional monarchy as a model. Although he personally favored Christianity, he envisioned Confucianism as China's state ideology and he would encourage more Western investment to help open up
China. All this is in substantial agreement with Sun Yat-sen’s views,which Li had picked up quickly. He spoke of himself as a military man with no interest in politics, but this was not true of his career in the next decade, when he was deeply involved in politics and eventually was a victim of power play.
When Sun Yat-sen was elected president of the republic in January 1912, Li became vice-president. After Sun handed over the presidency to Yuan Shikai two months later, Li continued to be vice-president. When Yuan was inaugurated in Beijing, Li first refused to leave his power base to go north. When he finally did, his suspicion came true for he was soon to find himself in a high position but with little real power in the shadow of Yuan. When Yuan died in 1916, Li became president and was still a man with no real power base. In the next seven years, he was in and out of office, depending on with which warlord he was allied at a particular time. In the spring of 1917, his dispute with his premier, the powerful warlord Duan Qirui, over China's joining World War I on the allied side degenerated into a mini-civil war in which each side called in other warlords to help. Li lost, and was forced out of office. In 1922, he resumed the presidency in a government controlled by bickering northern warlords only to find himself again forced out a year later. He lived out his last years in retirement and died in 1928, at the age of sixty-four.