Xu Shichang elected president of China

On 4 September 1918 both houses of the new parliament of the Republic of China met in Peking as an electoral assembly and elected a president for the next term. According to Chinese records, of the 436 members present 425 voted for Xu Shichang, five for the premier Duan Qirui, and the remaining votes were scattered. The next day the Chinese minister in Washington, Wellington Koo, informed the State Department that Xu had been elected “in accordance with the laws of the Republic”. He was to take office on 10 October, the seventh anniversary of the revolution, when the term ended that had been served since July 1917 by Feng Guozhang, Li Yuanhong’s successor.

The Anfu parliament

The election was largely the work of Duan and his faction, known as the Anhui clique. After the collapse of the restoration of Puyi in 1917 Duan refused to allow the return of the old parliament, which had opposed China’s entry into the war. In the spring of 1918 elections were called under a new electoral law. They were held only in some provinces, because the South did not recognise them and several provinces were engulfed in civil war. The campaign was run by the so-called Anfu Club, named after the Peking lane where it met, and organised by Duan’s closest associate, General Xu Shuzheng. According to Chinese studies the Club won about 330 seats. The American minister Paul Reinsch wrote in June that the elections had been manipulated by soldiers and politicians and that public opinion had shown almost no interest in them. Duan’s faction was also closely tied to Japan, which had been lending it money since 1917 and in May 1918 concluded a secret military agreement with his government.

Feng Guozhang, leader of the Zhili clique, Duan’s rival, announced on 12 August that he would not seek re-election. According to some accounts he made it a condition that Duan should leave the government together with him. The candidate therefore had to be acceptable to both factions of the Beiyang Army. Xu Shichang fitted the role. He was 62 and a civilian, a scholar of the Hanlin Academy, but also the closest friend and associate of Yuan Shikai. Under the empire he had been viceroy of the three provinces of Manchuria and deputy prime minister, and under the republic secretary of state in Yuan’s government. In 1915 he resigned in protest against Yuan’s plans to take the throne, which earned him respect. Reinsch observed that Duan was ready to give him precedence.

Two parliaments

The election did not unite the country. Since 1917 part of the deputies of the dissolved parliament had been sitting in Canton, where they set up a military government of the South, headed at first by Sun Yat-sen. The South regarded the Peking parliament as illegal, and therefore also the president it had elected. A plan to make the leader of the Zhili clique, General Cao Kun, vice-president also failed: some members boycotted the vote, which could not be held without a quorum. A few days later General Wu Peifu, commanding the northern troops in Hunan, declared publicly that he did not recognise the election.

The American chargé d’affaires in Peking, John MacMurray, reported on 17 September that the president-elect, despite pressure from the military, was seeking an understanding with the South. The government in Canton refused to recognise his election but was personally well disposed towards Xu. Xu took office on 10 October 1918, and Duan, as announced, ceased to be premier, though he kept his influence as head of the War Participation Bureau. The new president proclaimed “the cessation of war and the development of learning” and in November ordered the northern troops to halt operations against the South. He governed until June 1922, longer than any other president of the Warlord Era. As a civilian, however, he had no army of his own and survived by manoeuvring between the generals until the victors from the Zhili clique removed him from power.