Arming the Chinese: The Western Armaments Trade in Warlord China, 1920-1928

F. Quei Quo is a political science professor at Simon Fraser University.

A succinctly written piece of good work, this volume is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, supervised by renowned Chinese historian Jerome Ch’en, at York University in Toronto. It deals with the armaments trade in China, 1920-28. Evidently, a divided China, torn into pieces by warlords’ feuds against each other for control of a larger portion of the country, provided a profitable outlet for the international “merchant of death” in the post-WWI period. Although the western armaments merchants might have regarded the trade as straightforward business, it is doubtful if their governments, which often provided loans to the warlords, had similar simplistic motives.

Unlike most historians, who tend to treat this period of Chinese history with a total negative approach, Dr. Chan sees objectively that the trade also brought China some progress in military training and science. They were unintended by-products. The death of Zhang Zuolin in 1928 and the initiation of unification war by Chiang Kai-Shek in the same year, however, did not end the era of warlordism in China. Chiang’s Nationalist Army in reality was an amalgamation of warlord troops now given division or army numbers instead of the old prefixes of regional names. China remained divided until 1949.

This is a highly recommendable book!