Featured on Portsmouth Point: Poetry and Petty Crime: the Tale of Zhang Zhonchang

By Ivan C, Year 12

“The sky god is also named Zhang,

Why does he make life hard for me?

If it doesn't rain in three days,

I'll demolish your temple,

Then I'll have cannons bombard your mom.”

Zhang Zongchang, the author of this great poem, was a Chinese warlord in the early 20th Century. Shockingly, he was only semi-literate. But behind the comedic poems (which might not have actually been written by him), is a brutal warlord who maintained his rule over the Shandong era in a barbaric, and mismanaged way, feeding his own addictions for power, opium and sex.

Zhang Zongchang was born in 1881 to an alcoholic musician and a mother one source describes as a “practicing witch”. Zhang did not grow up particularly well off, resulting in him becoming involved in petty crime. During some point in his early life, he maintained some work in Siberia, where he learned how to speak Russian. Zhang grew up to be a towering six foot six, and as an adult described himself as “a graduate of the school of forestry”. Zhang then became a bandit, then a soldier in the Russian army, and then returned to being a bandit, and rose to become a leader of his gang. After the Xinhai revolution in 1911, in which the Qing dynasty was overthrown by the Chinese republic, Zhang left his life of crime and joined a Green Standard Army and quickly impressed his commanding officers. Zhang impressed his superior to such an extent that he was named his successor. However, after the second revolution in 1913, which failed and led to the death of Zhang’s superior on the losing side, Zhang's army was reduced to a symbolic role for its revolutionary leanings. Zhang’s ego and pride did not allow this to pass however, as Zhang proceeded to shoot a revolutionary in 1916, showing his loyalty and leading to him becoming commander of the Vice President’s personal guard.

After rising from petty crime to overseeing the personal security of the vice president himself, Zhang returned to Manchuria in 1922, joining the Fengtian Clique of the warlord Zhang Zuolin and rose quickly in the ranks. One slightly questionable story explaining this, is that on Zhang Zuolin’s Birthday, Zuolin was being showered in extravagant gifts from various warlords, until Zhonchang’s present arrived. It was an empty basket. Naturally, Zuolin was confused and angry, until the meaning behind the present was explained to him. Zhonchang was suggesting that he was willing to shoulder any weight Zuolin placed on his soldiers. This impressed Zuolin so much that he gave Zhonchang a command in his army before either of them ever met in person.

While Zhang may have not been very explicitly talented with his penmanship, he proved to be a more capable general, as he modernised his army by making use of armoured trains, which were a very cost effective, efficient and safe way of transporting supplies and his troops across the large distances that they were required to travel across China. He also was able to recruit a large number of fleeing Anti-Bolshevik ‘white’ Russians, largely because of his ability to speak Russian. He successfully organised them into specialised units, with even a Cossack bodyguard unit. He formed medical Units entirely made up of Russian women, who also trained others in his units in medicine, allowing his army to be well cared for. At some point he seemed to command some sort of small air force. However, Zhang’s troops were notorious for brutalising civilian populations, as they were famous for ‘Splitting melons’ - smashing the skulls of people with the ends of their rifles. Zhang shows the brutality that plagued China at this point in history, as soldiers wreaked havoc on civilian populations, who had no way of preventing the soldiers from stealing from and killing people who objected to the new regime.

In 1924, the second Zhili-Fengtian war broke out, giving Zhang Zhonchang a chance to prove himself and bolster his reputation. And prove himself he did, as he and Li Jingling took the critical Lengkou pass, allowing their armies to strike their enemy from the flanks. In April 1925, he took Shanghai and Nanjing. Shanghai was a key point in the opiate smuggling trade, so Zhang became highly involved. Being an opium addict himself, he maintained connections to the Shanghai criminal world, even while he was in power. While it fits Zhang's overall character as a mad dictator that he was addicted to opioids, it is representative of a wider issue in China - the opium market. Legalised in the treaty that ended the second opium war with Britain, millions of people in China had become addicted to opiates as a result of it. Despite having dire consequences for the lives of the civilians, it helped finance the East India company throughout the 19th Century, which is all Britain needed to turn a blind eye to corruption and impact on civilians.

Around this time, Zhang was starting to add to what would become a long list of ridiculous nicknames. “The Dogmeat General” was either given to him because of his preference for a tonic brand name “Dogmeat”, or his addiction to the gambling game “Pai Gow”, which is known as “Eating dog meat” when playing. Or because he ate dogs. Every day. He also had other names such as “General eighty-six” - A reference to how his penis was the same length as 86 Mexican silver coins stacked on top of each other - or “The three legged General”. That one doesn’t really need to be explained.

Later the same year, Zhang was pushed out of Shanghai and was then made military governor of the region of Shandong. Unsurprisingly, Zhang was useless at leading administration too. In three years, Zhang destroyed the local economy through what one historian describes as “graft, mismanagement and outright destruction” and caused immense hyperinflation by issuing the local currency as fast as it was being printed, leading to the collapse of the provincial education system due to a lack of funding. Zhang was far removed from these issues however, as he was in his headquarters in Jinan. Here, Zhang led a medieval-style court that held large banquets and feasts. Zhang’s mismanagement of his province led to resistance of his leadership, as small communist militias known as ‘the red spears’ took on the warlord, despite being under armed. Zhang tried to put these resistances down with brutal responses, by bashing in more skulls.

However, Zhang’s notorious rule of Shandong eventually ended with the Northern Expedition, as the Guomindang, known in England as nationalists, united with communists to end the rule of warlords in China. However, because of internal dynamics in the united front, the nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, purged thousands of leftists in 1927. However, this allowed a relatively unknown communist to further his belief that the workers revolution had to come from rural peasants, rather than the traditional communist that it should be industrial workers. He was called Mao Zedong. Zhang Zhonchang was one of the oppressors that set the foundations for the communist revolution in china, that would lead to even more oppressive regimes for the Chinese people. Zhang, now exiled to Japan, tried many times to take back the Shandong region unsuccessfully. Nevertheless, returning to Manchuria with Japan in 1932, Zhang Zhonchang was gunned down at a train station by the nephew of one of the officers he killed, his last words reportedly being “No Good!”.

Zhang’s story is so absurd, that it is certainly funny to research, as I kept on reading and was repeatedly shocked as I continued to research, but behind the funny anecdotes and myths that surround him, is someone who demonstrates the serious issues that plagued this era of Chinese history - the brutal inter-warlord warfare that caused irreparable damage to civilians in China, and that led to control of the country falling into a brutal dictatorship that killed tens of millions of people in China. Zhang is a perfect example of how the chaos of this era of Chinese history led to undeserving people gaining power, and the consequences of this on innocent civilians, as the people of Shandong had their lives and futures deteriorate, as Zhang exacerbated already horrible circumstances.

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