Centralized Regionalism: The rise of regional fiscal-military states in China, 1916–28

Warlordism in early Republican China was more than political fragmentation and intensive warfare. It involved serious efforts and breakthroughs in state-making at the regional level. Warlords or regional forces that centralized and bureaucratized their fiscal and governing institutions would eventually outcompete those who did not. Geopolitical advantages and access to modern economic and financial resources added to their competitiveness. The Guangdong-based Guomindang force prevailed over all others precisely because of a combination of all these factors in its state-building efforts by 1928. Central to state-making in early twentieth-century China, therefore, was the rise of regional fiscal-military states and their rivals for national dominance. China joined some of the most prominent latecomers to nation states in other parts of the modern world in their shared bottom-up path of state-building.