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CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN WARLORD CHINA: Tradition, Modernization and Manchuria. By Ronald Suleski. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. 2002. xvi, 302 pp. US$63.95, cloth. ISBN 0-8204-5278-5.
Warlords have a bad name. They behave badly, they swagger, they rob and plunder, they fight senseless wars. National governments and armies hate them because they accept no authority. Civilian populations hate them because their military ambitions always take precedence over the interests of civilian society. But the existence of warlords is not a product of their own venality; rather, they are the product of the collapse of a national government.
China's warlord period was one of the darkest of her modern history. The conventional wisdom was to blame the ills of the period on the warlords themselves. More recently, in China, Taiwan and abroad, the trend has been not to label the warlords as evil, but to see them in the context of their times. Much research has been done in China, usually...