Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Well Hung Warlord Who Tried to Conquer China

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Mia Wong is joined by Robert Evans to discuss Zhang Zongchang. FOOTNOTES: China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912—1949 by James E. Sheridan https://1lib.us/book/6061335/d193d2 Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor by Elizabeth Perry https://libcom.org/blog/perry-shanghai-on-strike From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1925-125 by Arthur Waldron  https://1lib.us/book/3499805/d42a27 War and Geopolitics in Interwar Manchuria: Zhang Zuolin and the Fengtian Clique during the Northern Expedition by Kwong Chi Man  https://1lib.us/book/3414209/ad41dd War and Nationalism in China 1925-1945 by Hans J. van de Ven https://1lib.us/book/869780/3a3d51 Fred Barton and the Warlords' Horses of China: How an American Cowboy Brought the Old West to the Far East: Larry Weirather https://www.amazon.com/Fred-Barton-Warlords-Horses-China-ebook/dp/B018J3PS24 Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, 2nd Ed by Patricia Buckley Ebrey https://1lib.us/book/2287567/15aeb7 Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 by Barbara W. Tuchman https://1lib.us/book/859718/9f22a5 The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism by Edward A. Mccord https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft167nb0p4;query=;brand=ucpress The Chaotic Epoch: Southwestern Chinese Warlords and Modernity, 1910-1938 https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/h989r366q Chinese Warlord Armies 1911-30 (Men-at-Arms) by Philip Jowett https://1lib.us/book/956034/cffc01 Hong Kong political strikes: A brief history By Leung Po-lung https://lausan.hk/2019/hong-kong-political-strikes-brief-history/ The 18 March Incident of 1926 Revisited: Looking at the Wider Context by Kwong Chi Man  https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/255495 A Tale of Two Warlords Republican China During the 1920s by Matthew R. Portwood and John P. Dunn https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/a-tale-of-two-warlords-republican-china-during-the-1920s/ 1922: The Hong Kong Strike: The Anarchist Federation https://libcom.org/history/1922-the-hong-kong-strike The wildest warlord in the Republic of China, general Zhang Zongchang who published a collection of poems by Jiang Zhongyuan https://www.thenewslens.com/article/99950 The Chinese Warlord That Intimidated the Gods by Mwanikii https://historyofyesterday.com/the-chinese-warlord-that-intimidated-the-gods-83f23323e20d CHINA: Potent Hero http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,928072,00.html JAPAN: Murder Price http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,732838,00.html   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, hi, hi, America Podcast. Robert Evans. Behind the Bastards. Yeah, we're coming in. This one's been rough. There's been a lot of disasters behind the start of this episode. Behind the Bastards podcast.

We're talking about the worst people in all of history. First off, I got the time wrong. Our guest today, we're doing Reverse Bastards, where someone reads me a story about a terrible person. It's another coup. We have a lot of coups. We're like, you know, Guatemala. Most of Latin America throughout like the 60s to present day, actually. We're a lot like all that.

And my coup guest today is our friend Christopher from Worst Year Ever. You know him on Twitter as Ice Must Be Destroyed Guy. Yeah. How's it going, Christopher? It's going pretty good. I have successfully come out in charge of this war large struggle. Yeah. Successfully taking control of Beijing.

It feels good for about two hours, which is about the average time that people hold Beijing in this period. Very excited. Well, you've given us a little bit of a hint about the episode for today. I want to start this by noting that you are in Chicago, which I thought meant you were in the eastern standard time, because I assume everything east of Arizona exists in the same time zone unless it's Texas. And that is apparently not the case. No, for some reason, Chicago and Texas are the same time zone, which makes absolutely no sense.

I mean, I haven't spent much time in Southern Illinois, but I think if you broke off a bunch of Southern Illinois. I technically grew up there for a little while. Yeah. I mean, they're not like that different. I just want to let listeners know that as we were testing our levels for this recording, I went, is there an airplane flying over somebody's house right now? And it was just Robert's foot massager that he thought he could use while we recorded this podcast.

It was worth the shot, Sophie. It was worth the try. Look, it's impressive, horrifying. It wouldn't be the first time I keep doing things that create odd noises. Like a couple of weeks ago, he had an episode where there was like a clinking sound to the whole episode and people kept being, what is it? And it was a moon clip of 44 plus P ammunition for my gigantic revolver that I was playing with as a desk toy. I removed that and then I got the foot machine.

So it's just a disaster over here at all times. You're a professional, but you know, I'm a professional. This is literally the only thing I do for money now. Today you are not our host. You are against. Today I'm not. So Christopher, do you want to tell us what we're talking about? Want to get started here?

Yeah, yeah, Robert, I want to ask you something. How do you feel about warlords? Oh, I'm very pro. I hope to be one someday. The health care seems to be shit, but usually don't live long enough for that to really matter. I already own a Mauser C96, which a lot of my favorite warlords were during the Chinese Civil Wars. And that was a popular gun there. So I feel like I'm already halfway to being a proper warlord.

Yeah, seems like a good time. I don't really know any downsides to being a warlord. Well, sometimes you get assassinated by the Japanese. Yes. It seems to be the biggest one. I'm already very worried about that. So yeah. It's a constant problem in the field.

All right, so this week we are doing Zhang Zongchang, who is probably China's most famous warlord, and he's 100% the warlord who is having the most fun in this period. Oh, hell yeah. That's the guy I like then, yeah. Yeah, he's having a ball. You've got to make history work for you, you know? Yeah. What was that name again?

Zhang Zongchang. Zhang Zongchang. OK. Zhang. Zhang. Yeah, OK. We're working there. And I'm pretty good on Zhang.

OK, I can do this. We can do this. He's also known as the dog meat warlord. OK. I don't know if I like that part with three dogs in the room with me right now. Yeah, OK, so we will get to this, but he doesn't eat dogs. This is entirely unrelated to the consumption of dogs, which is, again, pretty incredible, considering that he's called the dog meat warlord.

Yeah, I was assuming dog meat general. Some eating dog meat, probably. No, not from the eating dog meat. OK, OK, well yeah, let's get into this. All right, Zhang was born on February 13th, 1881 in a rural village in Shandong province. His family was incredibly poor. Later in life, Zhang will claim not to have known what a pillow was growing up. Jesus.

Yeah, you know, Zhang is a character where there's approximately 10 billion sort of myths floating around about him. But I actually believe this one, like his family is poor by the standards of 1800s rural China, which is, you know, not a great place to begin the beginning. That's a whole new benchmark for poverty is like, what is a pillow? Yeah, it's something. Well, I'm OK. Jesus. All right.

His father played trumpet at funerals and worked as sort of a barber who shaves people's heads for religious ceremonies. I'm seeing why he was poor. Yeah, well, yeah, and, you know, and his mom does like small time ritual magic for money. Yeah. And, you know, as you can pick up on work is incredibly unstable and infrequent for both of them. Now, this is the era of child labor. And I mean, OK, it's still the era of child labor, but it was really the era of child labor

back then. And this means that Zhang started his first job when he was either 12 or 13. And his first job is it's kind of cute. He would accompany when his dad would play trumpet at funerals. Like go along with him and play symbols. OK, OK, getting into the family business, which is getting into the terrible family business. It does not pay enough for pillows. Good call.

Good call. Yeah. Other than the sort of whole crushing poverty part, we don't know a huge amount about his family life other than that. He absolutely adores his mother, which seems to be why when his mother left his father to move to Manchuria, Zhang goes with his mother. And it's sort of unclear why this happens, but what most likely seems to happen is that the family just wasn't making enough money to support the three of them.

So Zhang's mother took him to the provincial capital to go look for work there. This is the first similarity between this Chinese warlord and Dr. Phil. And I'm curious as to whether or not it will be the last. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about that when I was writing this and I don't know. There's a little bit there. There's a little bit there, except I don't know, different. Dr. Phil doesn't end up in the army.

And I think that's the big difference here. I mean, I can imagine him as a bandit, but. I can imagine Dr. Phil as a bandit for sure. He is a kind of bandit, a spiritual kind, though. I think this guy's actually going to work out to be much more ethical than Dr. Phil. Well, we'll see. We'll see about that. Okay.

All right. So he moves with his mom to Manchuria. Yeah. And while he's there, he's about 15 at this point, he starts working as a servant in a gambling house, which gives him his first exposure to this class of petty criminal. That's most of his youth is going to be spent cavorting with these people. And this pisses off the local gentry and they just expel him from the city. Him specifically, not the criminals he's like hanging out with.

Why do they hate him more than these other people? Yeah. My guess on that is that so the actual local criminals probably have some kind of political power and he just doesn't. And so I can't really do anything to them, but they just like, we'll kick you out of town. Okay. It's all right. Okay.

So once there, he does the thing that most young men do when they have no jobs and are thrown into the countryside. He becomes a bandit. Hell yeah. All right. So this guy's moving up in the world. He's doing better than his dad already. Yeah. Now, we, for some obvious reasons, we know very little about what he was doing as a bandit.

But we do know that his mother, who's now completely on her own, starts to sort of date a series of men for their financial support. And eventually, a guy she was dating murders her previous ex and the guy gets sent to prison. But because this is, and I can't emphasize this enough in incredibly fucked up patriarchal society, she also gets exiled from the city for the murder, even though she had no involvement in it. Okay. City leaders just went, yeah, we're exiling you too. Yeah, your boyfriend murdered somebody. You got to get the fuck out of here.

All right. So that's the kind of society. Okay. Oh, don't worry. It gets worse. That was basically the whole world at this point. Yeah. Okay.

So once she's kicked out, she's able to date one more guy and she scrapes off enough money to go back to Zhong's father. But when she gets back to him, he's flat broke and sells her to a grain merchant for some millet, which is apparently a thing you could do at this time. Wow. You could just sell your wife to a grain merchant for millet? I would condemn him for this. But this is the best financial investment he's made in his life, is it? I mean, it was a wholesale merchant, so maybe you got a good deal?

Yeah. He really needed that fucking millet. Okay. I shouldn't be laughing. This is horrible, but like, Jesus. This is just like such a bleak story. Okay, so at this point, Zhong's mom just disappears from the stock market for 20 years, but don't worry about her. She is the only person in the store who's getting a happy ending.

And like, frankly, after all of this shit, she's like one of the people who deserves it the most. Yeah. So yeah, Zhong's mother will return later. Now, Zhong is banditing for about two years, but eventually he's able to get a relatively stable job in Manchuria in 1899. And because Manchuria is going to play a pretty big role in this story, I'm going to give a sort of brief introduction to it. Manchuria is, geographically, it's in the very far northeast part of China.

Like, it's kind of like, it's China's version of New England, except imagine if it's at a border in Canada, it bordered like Russia, Korea, and was five minutes away from Japan. So, you know, and when being in the middle of China, Korea, Russia, and Japan means that just basically every empire is constantly fighting for control over it. And this also means that all of the empires wind up putting just an enormous amount of capital into Manchuria sort of manufacturing belts and railway systems. And Zhong, Zhong's never able to get one of like the really highly paid stable jobs in Manchuria's arsenal, which is one of the largest sort of weapons manufacturers in China. But what he is able to get is a job on the Chinese Eastern Railway. Now, the Chinese, the Chinese Eastern Railway is a rushing concession.

It's one of the concessions that sort of the Qing dynasty has been giving out to like the various empires that it loses wars to in the sort of 19th and 20th centuries. And the way these things work is that like, okay, so when you give the session to a country, you get like, if you're, say like Britain, you get a chunk of land and you just control that, like that part of China, like just under your control, you impose your own legal system, they have their own police force. And Germany does this to one of their port cities, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And this happens all over the country. And there's a really big and famous like French concession that's just like a third of Shanghai. This is all going to become important later when the sort of just absolutely horrific treatment of Chinese workers in these concessions boils over into just full scale conflict. But for right now, the most important thing about Zhong's job on the concession is that it gives him his first real contact with Russia.

Now, for all sort of like lack of education, and it's really questionable whether Zhong really ever got more than like two years of schooling. He's extremely good at learning languages. And he like almost immediately is able to learn Russian and is able to very quickly leverage this job wants to sort of railway where it dries up to become a chief foreman and a gold mine in Siberia, which is basically because he was the only Chinese worker to speak Russian. And the Russians trusted him enough to give him a gun, which would turn out to be great for Zhong in an absolute fiasco for literally every other human being in China. But it goes great for him. I mean, that's that is a story you see a lot in this colonial period is like the folks who make bank and are really successful and often wind up basically owning huge chunks of the world are usually polyglots. The same with the imperial powers to like all of these British colonizers like the dudes who are actually doing the colonizing tend to be people who just like pick up language because it's like your number one asset in this period of time other than shamelessness and sociopathy is being able to talk to everybody.

That makes sense. Yeah, and it's really like if you're trying to work in this period, this is like one of this or being a really good bandit or basically like the only two real ways you can even sort of work yourself up in the world. And you know, Zhong Zhong is doing pretty well from self here. Yes, but you know, one day he's working at this mining camp and they can't because it's attacked by a bear. Okay. I don't know if you know about this, Robert. I'm just psyched that a bear attack is coming into the story. Everything that I want in a story so far, so please.

I don't know if you know this, Robert. Bears, they're really big. Yeah, they're pretty, pretty sizable. Yeah, they're extremely strong and their mass means that unless you have a very, very large gun, you're not going to bring it down with one shot. Yeah, I have a bear gun and it weighs like four and a half pounds. It's a handgun. Yeah. What?

Yeah, I have what? You might need to shoot a bear, Sophie. Do you want me to not be able to shoot a bear if a bear attacks? I... Christopher. Bear, look, bears can tip over 700 pounds steel like dumpsters. It's not even that much effort for them. My Prius is only like 700 pounds, Sophie.

I'm still scared from the guy who's running in the recall election in California who's been using a bear as a prop in his ads. So I'm triggered. That's all I'm saying. So this bear comes into camp. Yeah. And Zhong... OK, he has this incredibly dinky 1800s rifle and he just easily kills this bear. So he's got it with like...

Extremely calmly. Nailed it through the heart or the eye or something. Yeah, I couldn't find a description of it, which is sort of wild. I mean, it's probably, if it's a mid-1800s gun, I'm certain like the best it could be is probably something like a Dries needle gun, which is kind of an early pre-cartridge bolt action rifle. If it is a cartridge rifle. I mean, if it is a cartridge rifle, the good news is that it's probably a fairly large round because most of the it was usually like some kind of like 30 out six or somewhere in that ballpark. But I'm going to guess the fact that this is the late 1800s in China means that he's not using like there's a decent chance it's a black powder. Anyway, yeah, that's a heck of a thing to be able to do with the kind of weapon he probably was packing.

Yeah, and this, you know, this has a fairly predictable reaction. Everyone else there and he just immediately gets this like cult following among the workers because he just, you know, murdered this bear extremely easily. And, you know, this is sort of a point where you start to see the things that are going to make him a really good soldier because I mean, he's remarkably calm under pressure. He's an incredibly good shot and he's also incredibly charismatic, which is important for a guy who is an estimates very here. This dude is somewhere between six foot six and seven feet tall. Holy shit. Yeah, he's tall as fuck. And he's tall.

He's that tall growing up impoverished in rural China in the 1800s, which is wild. Yeah, it's unbelievable. That's huge for people who grow up in the United States with access to all of the protein they could possibly want. That is, oh God. He's an absolute monster. Yeah. You know, like, like at this point, like it's kind of hard not to be sympathetic to him. I mean, this is, you know, shooting bears, he's a giant.

He's a bear shooting giant bandit polyglot. He's pretty rad. Yeah, he loves his mom. Like it's great. And, you know, because this is behind the bastard, this is where everything immediately starts to go to shit. Hell yeah. Yeah, this is this is like the moment where Saddam is is is robbing his or is threatening his high school principal at gunpoint before Saddam turns bad. This is it.

This is the part where you're like, tell me something bad. Yep. Let's go. So in 1911, a revolution toppled the ruling Qing dynasty and replaced it with a republic led by Yuan Shikai, a man whose sole qualification for this job is that he has the largest army in China when the fighting stops. I mean, what other qualifications would there be for this job? Well, you know, for exactly one day, Sun Yat-sen, a man with actual real political qualifications was in charge. And then he was like, this guy, Yuan is the only person with an army of large enough to hold the country together. So we're just going to give it to him.

And so, yeah, Yuan winds up writing this country and he is a disaster. He, you know, he starts in 1911, he's basically lurching from crisis to crisis. There's multiple rebellions against him until in late 1915, he makes one of the most baffling disaster decisions anyone has ever made in human history. He convenes an assembly to declare himself emperor. Now, again, this is a guy who was in power. Literally, the only reason he's in power is because of a revolution, the sole point of which was getting rid of the monarchy. And Yuan looks around at the countries collapsing around him and he goes, I know what will unite the nation behind me, declaring myself emperor. Yeah, completely scans.

No flaws with this plan. Are you going to tell me this doesn't go well? Now, to his credit, Yuan did briefly unite the entire country because basically all of it immediately goes into revolt to drive him out. And, you know, he kind of remarkably holds on for about three months before deciding that he wasn't going to be emperor after all and politely asking everyone to please stop revolting so we could go back to the business of running the country. And, you know, kind of sadly, we don't know whether this would have worked or not because three months after he abdicates, he dies of an ermia. Okay. And with his death in 1916 begins what is known in Chinese history as the warlord period. Yeah, this is what that game where you stab a bunch of people to death was about, right?

That no, that's that's that's the warring states period. Oh, that's the warring states period. Yeah. Luba. Luba was earlier. Yeah, you're right. Because nobody had guns. Everybody was stabbing each other.

Okay. This is this is that. But significantly more message. Dynasty war. That's the name. Yeah. This is this is this is the Kaiser Reich special. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. And this is, by the way, why we're bringing you on and will increasingly have you on is because I attempted to do several stories about China and other parts of Southeast Asia and very quickly realized that like when I'm doing like Europe, you know, or the United States or even parts of Latin America, just because it's a place I'm closer to and have spent more time in, I have like a certain base of historical understanding that I can build

on and I don't know anything about this. So I'm I'm I'm fascinated and grateful to you for studying this part of the world for years and years. Yeah. Well, okay, you know, here, let me let me let me let me resuscitate your reputation because there is something that you do in fact know significantly more about than I have. You have been in way more civil wars than I have been in a couple of civil wars. Yeah.

So I'm going to run my my simple model of the two kinds of civil wars past you and we'll see what you think about it. Okay. Okay. So on the one hand, you have one kind of civil war where half the country starts fighting the other half is like the American Civil War. You very rarely see this. Yeah.

And the other hand, you have civil wars where the whole country fragments into a million pieces and every single one of them starts fighting each other. Yeah, we call that doing a Syria. Yeah. Yeah. Or Yemen or Yemen or a lot of places. It's kind of the modern way of doing stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, what's going to happen in this period, except this war, like I, you know, when I was looking at when I first looked at the control map, I my brain shattered and I've never recovered sense and like I've never I've never longed for the simplicity of the Yemeni Civil War before. But this war, there are over a thousand warlords in God. Yeah. So between 1916 and 1928, they fight 700 different wars.

That's that's too many different wars. Like you gotta if I was in there, what I would say is like, we can cut that down to 200, 300 at the most. Like I feel like I feel like I could have helped like consolidate the wars. What they needed was a consultant, a guy to be like, look, you guys are fighting the same war that these guys are fighting, let's bundle that into one big war. And then we got less wars to deal with. My pitch.

That's my pitch to China 150 years ago. Right. I mean, look, I'm all for it because it makes the history, it would make it would have made the history like incomprehensibly easier. Like there are there are 20 pages of this script that's just me trying to explain two different factions taking and losing control of Beijing that have that have been there's not here anymore because it's yeah, this is this is this is maybe the messiest conflict I've ever encountered.

And we're about to dive into it. Yeah. First, it's time for products and services. You know what won't fragment China into hundreds of different warring quasi state militia things. These ads question. They will not. They will not. So confident saying none of the people who advertise on our show have the kind of like

flex to to destroy the Chinese state and launch a new civil war. Fair enough. Yeah. I just I don't think the dick pill guys have that much weight to throw around. I really hope not. Oh, God. Oh, God, OK. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told

you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French in our newest show. We take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history

books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. To Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

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bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. All right. Let's get going. Okay, so before we fully launch into this, for reference purposes, we need to stop and

do the briefest, most basic and most half-assed Chinese geography lesson in human history because this is the point where Chinese geography becomes very important in the story. So we're going to, look, we're only going to give you two cities. So I think we could do this. So at the very south of China, there is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is controlled by the British at this point. It's separated basically from the province of Guangzhou, which is very south of China. Shanghai is kind of in the middle of China, north-southwise, but on the east coast.

And then Beijing is further north of that. And then the very far north along the border with Korea's Bench area. And there's all of the different sort of willard clicks in this period because this whole thing is the greatest proof I've ever encountered that high school never ends. It's A, it's all clicks, B, all the clicks form for just incredibly petty reasons. Like one of the most powerful clicks, a click that takes Beijing and rules most of China for four years happened because one click of officers thought the other click wasn't promoting them fast enough.

And to make it worse, all of these people are classmates because they all, they all either went to sort of a couple of military academies either in China or Japan. Yeah, this is like, I mean, this is the same as a lot of European history, to be honest. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's just, it's high school with more guns, which is fairly impressive considering how many guns. Well, it's less guns than an American high school to be honest.

You know, these people have a lot of guns. They do. Like, it's, it's, it's pretty impressive. I was taking a cheap shot, please continue. So it's sort of unclear what Zhang was doing during the sort of revolutionary upheaval in 1911. All, this is another thing with Zhang, every accounts basically conflicts on what he was doing.

What we know for sure is that by 1913, he ended up as a division commander in the army, stationed near Shanghai. But in 1913, the nationalists who are known in the US, the KMT for reasons that piss me off to no end, but I will not get in here, stage, stage a disasters revolt. And after that revolt fails in sort of late 1913, Zhang gets politically sidelined and tell the formal start of the warlord period. Now another person sidelined after the failed 1913 revolution was the famous nationalist general.

And this guy, like my mom had heard of this guy and who had not heard of basically anyone else in the story except for the main character. So he's, he's, you know, he's, he's an important figure in, in, in the KMT and the sort of nationalist party. He's also an extremely important organized crime guy. And we will get into in the next episode why he's both a KMT general and a crime boss. This man's name. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's a, it's a wild story. But yeah, for now, this guy's name is Chen Chi-Mei. Um, when, when, when the nationalist revolt fails, Chen does something that I think bastards pod listeners would recognize immediately. He flees to the early 1900s China's version of Mexico, which is Japan. Hell yeah. Hell yeah.

Good dude. Good dude. It's great. Yeah. Solid. All right. Yeah. Japan.

Japan is, Japan is, it's, it's literally just Mexico now. Um, you know, when we just grew up in China and the army comes after you flee to Mexico and why you flee to Mexico or now you flee to Japan. And you know, while you're in Japan, you have two choices. You can either just sort of live out your life quiet, quietly, or you can plot your triumph and return to China. And the second thing is what Chen ends up doing in 1916, Chen saw, saw his opportunity and returns from Japan to Shanghai to start another revolution against the government.

And this is where Zhang takes his first real action of the brave new world of world artism. He has Chen assassinated, which this, this has a number of sort of effects. One the nationalists at this point just sort of crumple and they're not going to be a real political force for a while in China. The second important thing is that this is how Zhang gets his in with a couple of very, very powerful political patrons, uh, the most important person here is this dude named Upe Fu, who's also known as the Jade Marshall, who is, he is universally regarded as the world art period's greatest strategist and he, he runs one of the, uh, world art cliques.

And you know, he, he rewards Zhang for his loyalty and having his nationalists guy assassinated and Zhang like moves up in the world really quickly. He briefly becomes the vice president's personal bodyguard and then eventually he, he's, he's given a new command in the army of his own. That's kind of random now. Yeah. It's this whole period's politics. It's really weird because all basically all career advancement has to do with like which

click you're able to please. And so, you know, if you do something for one click, they'll give you something. If you fail, then they kick you out. It's, it's high school. Yeah. Except a bunch of people are dying. Yeah. Or more people are dying.

I'm like, so like American high school, like Robert. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we're, we're, look, we're, we're all familiar with this. We all, we all understand the source material here. Yeah. All right. You know, unfortunately the, these people are incredibly fickle and Zhang managed to

lose his entire army in an incredibly minor sort of border dispute war and this gets him just kicked back into the political wilderness. Do they get killed or do they just kind of like peace out from him? It's unclear. This is one of those things where, so you know what I'm talking about, there's 700 wars, right? So most of them, this war I can literally, the only reference I can find to its existence is that Zhang like lost his army in it, but it's really unclear what happened.

And so there's two stories of it. One of them is that like they all died and then he goes back to Beijing and tries to bribe one of Wu Peifu's allies with just a bunch of these tiny golden lions to get in the unit assigned to him. But Wu Peifu finds out about this and kicks him out of the army. And you know, okay, bribing a superior officer with a bunch of tiny golden lions is like exactly the kind of thing he would do. But like the sourcing's not good because again, this, this man's life is just this incredible

haze of stories. There's some other sources that say that, so she loses his war and then his army is absorbed into another warlord army. And then that warlord also subsequently loses a war and collapses. But either way, what we know is that he fleed sort of broken completely alone back to Manchuria in 1922. And okay, this is, this is, this is the point where I have to make another brief announcement, which is that there are two completely unrelated dudes in the story named Zhang.

This is largely because one of the early Chinese dynasties essentially got pissed off. The people in villages didn't, like they were trying to tax, didn't have last names. And so they just came in and gave everyone last names. And yes, and they'd have like a hundred of these names. These are going to call like the old 100 names. And they do this so they can get tax records, get better tax records now every like everyone in China has the same last name because they just forced names on people. Yeah, two of the main characters in this, in this, I have the same name is what you're

telling me. Yeah. So, so there's two big Zhangs. If I just say Zhang, I'm talking about our hero Zhang Zhong Zhang, who is the dog meat warlord. I, the second Zhang is the guy we're going to meet now, whose name is Zhang Zhuling. He's the warlord of Manchuria. If I talk about him, I'll say his full name or I'll just say his last name.

So it's no confusion. Unfortunately, for all of history and for us trying to get through the story, like basically the moment he gets to Manchuria, Zhang decides to try to join Zhuling's army. And this is another one of those things that there's a very weird story here, which is, so his attempt to get into the army seems to be that Zhuling throws this massive birthday party for himself because, you know, okay, so if you're a warlord, right, like, yeah, you're going to have some pretty wild ass birthday parties for sure. Yeah, this is what what is else is the point of being a warlord if you don't even require

explanation. Absolutely. Yeah. Now, now the weird part about this, so everyone else shows up to in it. Okay. So we're meeting the warlord, right? You show up to a birthday party with incredibly expensive gifts, Zhang just doesn't show up at all.

What he does instead is he sends these two empty Kuli baskets, which are those like, you know, those baskets that yeah, that are being care like a Kuli is like what the British called dudes in India, they would pay to carry shit for them. Yeah. People carry shit in. Yeah. They have like, there's like a pole that you hang them off of. Yeah.

There's a lot of people use them in China. So Zhang just like gives him these two empty baskets and Zhuling is extremely confused by this because, you know, okay, this guy doesn't show up to my birthday party and then just gives two baskets. Yeah. Kind of a weird flex for the warlord whose army you want to be in. Yeah. Yeah.

So what Zhang appears to have been implying and what Zhuling like somehow figures out through the powers of deductive reasoning that I don't have and I don't understand. But apparently what Zhang is saying is that the baskets are empty to represent that he would shoulder any burden that Zhuling would give him, which is weird. But this actually works. But that's like a weird like he's doing symbolism shit. Okay. Yeah.

So it works and Zhang is given a minor post in the army, which you know, we'll take it. And really fortunately for Zhang, a few months later, there's there's there's a revolt in Manchuria and Zhang is the person who puts it down. And for that, he's given a much like a, I don't know, I don't know, field grades like the right term for this, but he's given like a fairly seeming position. Yeah. And this this one decision is going to turn Zhang from a minor military commander into the most feared and despised warlord in all of China.

That makes sense. Yeah. And you know, this this sucks for the rest of China. But for Zhuling, this is this promotion should have to be an incredibly good idea. In 1922, Zhuling brings Zhang with him to negotiate with a group of Russian emigres who become trapped in Mongolia when the country gained independence from China in 1921. And we're trying to get out because Mongolia had just aligned itself with the USSR. And these Russians were former members of the pro-Zarist white army, which as as as

we know from the show had been defeated by the combined efforts of great hero, pod alumnester mock nose anarchist black army and the Bolshevik Red Army in the Russian Civil War. So there's a bunch of these Russian dudes in Mongolia. And because Zhang's incredibly fluent in Russian, she's able to just sort of extract them and convince these people to work for him. And this is where Zhang starts building up the core of what's going to be a very dangerous and incredibly formidable army. He gains about is like 3000 Russian infantry infantrymen who are, you know, they're well

trained, but you know, they're just sort of infantrymen. The big deal here is that he gets 1000 Russian cavalrymen who armed with lances, your favorite Mauser pistols and these just enormous fuck off swords become basically just the backbone of Zhang's new army. Yeah. And these guys are Cossacks basically, right? I don't I don't actually think they're Cossacks. I think they're just like Calvary then.

Yeah. I think I think it's just regular Russian Calvary, which is, you know, still just absolutely terrifying. Like, yeah, like these people have just fought through the Russian Civil War, which is like one of the worst wars in history. Yeah. They survived. Yeah.

They're just a bunch of like broken, dangerous monsters. And everyone in China is terrified of them and all the accounts are like kind of racist about it. But it's like, yeah, like, OK, if you were confronted with a group of people who like have been killing continuously for like 10 years now and like who probably read the protocols the Elder Zion to their children's bedtime stories, like I too would be afraid. Yeah. Yeah.

They sound terrifying. I'm certain they were. They probably have a couple of ethnic cleansings under their belts at the time they get to China. Yeah. Now, the White Russians also importantly bring another piece of technology from the Russian Civil War, armored trains. Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah. There's a great armored train stuff here. There is not a goddamn thing I love more in the world than a good armored train story. Yeah. There's there's some sadly, I can't get into the full thing here, but there's one of these trains is absolutely wild. Like one of these trains was like a train that the Czech legion had taken to like flee. So they'd like taken it across half of Russia to like flee and then it ends up in the hands

of the Japanese and then John gets ahold of it here. And then he starts incorporating it to his army. And this is also great because so the Chinese World War period, this is like the other great armored train war of the Russian Civil War. Now these trains, these trains are they they perform extremely well in this war, which is sort of weird because normally they don't perform that great because they have this problem where like, OK, so if you just cut the tracks in front of them, they're kind of useless.

Yeah. That is the downside of trains. Yeah. But when they don't do this, what you get essentially is a troop transport, a tank and an artillery battery roll up into one. And this combined with the Russian cavalry makes John's army incredibly fast. And this speed gives them like a really deadly edge against a sort of slower and worse train warlord armies that are going to sort of serve John well in the upcoming war.

Now OK, we've talked about the Russian cavalry, we've talked about the armored trains. So I think it's time we introduced we introduced John's third secret weapon, the baby squads. OK, all right, I'm I'm I'm excited to hear about this. Yeah. So the baby squads are John's special army of child soldiers. Who are commanded by his son, who is also a child. Now when we say child, are we talking like Garrison child or are we talking like child ass child?

You know, so the estimates vary on this. They seem to have been in their early teens. OK. OK. Like 14, 15, well, like 11, they got the OK. Yeah, it's it's, you know, but you know, child. Yeah. I mean, some of them are a child child.

Some of them are like older tweens. Yeah. And, you know, what's interesting about them, though, is so they get their own like incredibly fancy uniforms and they get trained with these. John has custom made German rifles that can be handled by children like imported. Like he breaks a weapons embargo to get these custom made German rifles that children can use. I mean, you know what I always say?

If you're going to arm children, you got to go with German guns. Nobody knows arming small children and sending them into war like the Germans, you know? That's just that's just historical fact. Yeah. Yeah. You have historical experience combined with quality craftsmanship. I mean, they just got through a war that with where they participated in a battle called the slaughter of the innocents, because they sent so many children off to die.

You know, I they're the right people to go to for child rifles is what I'm saying. Yeah. You know, it's a good choice. And, you know, I OK. So interestingly, so as best I can tell, the baby's gorgeous like a pet project that John gives to his like teenage son. But they're you know, but all accounts they're extremely well paid and well fed, which makes them one of like three units and John's entire army that is like paid on time and fed.

So you know, like to be fair to John also did every like literally every faction in this war is also using child soldiers. And it's notable that John spends like a huge amount of effort trying to like kick people out of his army, who he doesn't think are fit to fight. So like in 1925, he kicks like 30,000 troops out of his army for either being bandits, older, just like being too old or too young. Yeah, that is that's a lot of that. That's OK.

Yeah. Well, and this is another thing. These armies, the world armies are massive, like and you know, they kind of swell during when battles are happening as sort of this like mass conscription, they like recruit bandit groups. But like, I mean, there are battles in this war where there's there's there are single battles with 400,000 troops like this is. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, but somehow the baby squads never get cut up in this downsizing. And so they seem to have been there until the end of the war, which, you know, all in all, it's not the worst use of child soldiers have ever seen, but it's also not the best. So. Chung Chung Chung mid level child soldier user. Yeah. OK, that seems good.

I mean, you know, look, look, it's we've always said on this show, using children to fight wars for you is as much an art as it is a science, you know. And it sounds like he was pretty good at the science part, but maybe he could have been a little bit more artful in his use of minors as as death troopers, for sure. Yeah. Nobody's perfect. Pobody's nerf it, you know, you know, speaking of that, though, right? Like we're going to get here's something right where I'm going to attempt to redeem

Zhang after his child soldier army. So this is also the point in the story when Zhang's mother reappears and it's not clear if they'd like found each other sometime in between like when when when she was sold off for grain and when he joined the army. But by 1922, they've reunited and Zhang just like he he like loves his mom like they literally travel everywhere together. Like every time he goes out to the field, she's on the train. He just like lavages her with gifts and meals and attention and, you know, and she she lives

out the rest of her life in luxury. So, you know, good for her, she deserves it. It's take care of your mama, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's just kind of a shame how her son turned out question mark. I mean, look, you know, you you don't you don't make a happy mom omelet without breaking a couple of other people's children eggs.

Yeah. Yeah. And really, what are other people's children but fodder for the baby squads? Well, I mean, the benefit of using children as your soldiers is that it's very easy to make more children. Yeah. People have been doing it for forever. Yeah.

It's like it's like cutting down trees when they're when they're young. Yeah. Just plant more trees. Yeah. That's why we have so many trees. Yeah. So. So in 1924, a war starts between Wu Peifu and his clique, which is based out of Beijing

and Zhang Zhiling's clique, which is based out of Manchuria. And this begins a massive series of set piece battles on what is the greatest set piece on earth, the Great Wall of China. And this whole war is fought along like this is the famous part of the Great Wall. Like this is this is the part you've all seen pictures of it. It's the part that was built by the Ming dynasty to keep the Manchus contained in Manchuria. You know, and this means that in order to get from Beijing to Manchuria and Zhang Zhongchang is in Manchuria, attempting to invade Beijing, you have to go through one of these very small

number of heavily guarded passes. And it's these passes that the Great Wall of China was sort of built to fortify. So each of their armies sort of mass on their respective side of the Great Wall, and they try to prepare to force away the fight, the fort does sort of force away the passes. Now while everyone else was fighting this just like incredibly bloody pointless stalemate at one of the largest passes, Zhang moves up to attack another smaller pass hoping to sort of flank Wu Peifu's army. And Zhang immediately realizes the passes way under defended and just storms his way through

it. But realizing that he was just sort of alone on Wu Peifu's side of the mountain, he sits in the entrance and he waits for his chance to strike. And that chance is going to come after what I can only describe as absolute clown shit from one of Wu Peifu's subordinates costs him everything. So another very crucial mountain pass is held by the worst commander in Wu Peifu's army. This is a guy who, he's a general, but he's been given a general just because his brother is the president.

Now Wu's assumption is that this pass, it is literally impossible to screw up defending it because it's narrow and there's an artillery unit. And so Wu puts the artillery unit there assuming that okay if anyone comes to the pass, she's both moved with artillery. And Wu looks at this guy and is like okay, so we need to keep him out of the fighting because he put him anywhere where he can command troops, he's going to screw everything up. So we're going to put him in this pass, it'll be fine, you can't possibly not hold it. This would become the single greatest mistake of Wu Peifu's entire career.

His quote unquote general, and I'm using this term incredibly loosely, develops this like incredibly elaborate scheme where he's going to send his troops through the pass to lure the enemy army back through it so that he can shell the enemy army after luring them in. Like if you study any military history at all, it's like okay, this plan is incredibly convoluted, there's no way it's going to work. What happens instead is that Wu Peifu's general's troops, okay, so they go out and they retreat back into the pass.

But this guy mistakes his troops for the enemy and kills them all with his own artillery. Excellent. Solid general shit. Yeah, yeah, it's great stuff. And the guy on the other side of the pass, the commander on the other side of the pass is a guy named Han, and Han watches his opponent blowing up his entire army, rips his shirt off and just like charges into the pass, bare chested into the pass as minefield. Now between four and five thousand of Han's troops die in this attack, but by what I can

only describe as just an actual act of God, Han just like survives this and he disappears into the fabric of history having won a war by just doing a parody of Dude's Rock by charging shirtless into a minefield. Yeah, he just fucking Leroy Jenkins to his way to victory, absolutely. Incredible. And what happens next? So Wu Peifu hears about this charge and is like, okay, there's morons charging through the pass, it's fine, we have the artillery unit there.

What he doesn't know is that the artillery has used all of their ammo shelling their own troops. So Han's troops take the pass and the rest of Zhang Zhuling's army just floods through the Great Wall. And it's at this moment where Wu Peifu is betrayed by one of his subordinates and everything falls apart. So Wu Peifu makes, he makes one last desperate attempt to sort of like regroup. And for a very brief moment, it looks like this is going to work.

But unfortunately for him, Zhang Zhongcheng sees his chance, he's been sitting on the other side of this pass for the whole battle and he sees his chance and he makes, he launches an attack that splits Wu Peifu's remaining army in half and with just a single attack ends Wu Peifu's career. Or, you know, okay, so this is what you would think would happen in a normal war when you lose your entire army, all of your territory and all of your political support collapses. However, welcome to the warlord period where the rules are made up, the points don't matter and Wu Peifu somehow after literally losing everything will be back in part two, God,

this whole war. Hell yeah. Why not? I don't believe in this cancel culture bullshit. So look, if I feel like as a warlord, you're not really getting good until you've lost two or three armies, right? Yeah. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's like riding a bike, right?

You're going to fall a couple of times, you're going to lose a couple of armies, you're going to get tens of thousands of people killed, like that's just, you know, there's no avoiding it. Yeah, and, you know, the product of this is that if you look at the full history of this period, like it's basically a comic book plot, like there are dozens of characters who lose everything and then reappear and lose everything because just no one, no one ever dies until you see a body and even then, like, Yeah, it's like a Marvel movie.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. It's somehow less coherent. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things, the lesson here about all these guys who lose everything

repeatedly and keep coming back to lose more things and then some cases eventually win is that what determines winners and losers in history is that the, the winners lose just as often as the losers, but they have no shame about it. It's true. And you gotta keep that in mind. So never ask about how your actions affect other people. Use them as tools and walk into the pages of history like this guy. Yeah.

And the other really important thing here, betray your allies at the first opportunity. Oh, yeah. That goes without saying for sure. All the people who do well in this war immediately betray all of their friends and they get, they get rewarded for it. You know who won't betray their friends? I don't. I actually cannot verify.

I mean, I absolutely will, Sophie, because as soon as the dogs in your house bark, I threw you under the bus, you know, that's mean. That's why I'm successful, Sophie, throwing my friends under the bus, but you know who I won't throw under the bus. The products and services that support this podcast until they stop supporting this podcast, at which point they're dead to me. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup.

Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history

books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. All right. What else we got? Now, Zhong makes up like a bandit from this war.

So in... He is a bandit. Oh, yeah. I mean, he is now the supreme bandit, which is really what being a warlord is. He tries to take Shanghai in late 1924, but another warlord gets there first and they do this really awkward dance where both of them occupy parts of the city and everyone in Shanghai is like, oh, God, they're going to fight a battle here. Please go fight somewhere else.

Don't destroy our precious city. So eventually, this winds up involving a bunch of foreign governments and there's this huge set of negotiations. Eventually, the two warlords work out an agreement where they're both going to pull out of the city. Now, the other warlord, abides by the agreement, pulls his army out. Zhong just doesn't leave. He just stays there and occupies the city and several months into 1925, he finally gets

in order to leave Shanghai, but he's only sort of convinced to leave the city after he's given full control of his home province of Shandong, as well as the really frankly delightful title that we should bring back, Bandit Extermination Commander. Hell yeah. I like it. Yeah. He gets that for like a couple other provinces and it's in this moment as he sort of takes Shanghai and is given control of his home province of Shandong that he really becomes

the dog meat general. Now, Zhong was never like the best dude even before he was given absolute power over an entire province and an enormous fuck off army. I mean, you know, to repurpose the old anti-Nixon song, power corrupts. We know that by heart, but you have to admit Zhong had a head start. All right. Just the moment she takes real power, she goes wild. And one of the immediate products of this is he just starts collecting just this unbelievable

pile of nicknames. His most famous is Guoro Zhong Jing, or the dog meat general. A title he gains because of his reputation for playing a Chinese gambling game that's like domino based. And for some indescribable reason, people in Manchuria call this game eating dog meat. I don't know why this is like the best I could come up with is that one of the words kind of sounds like dog. Who knows?

Now, now, confusingly, I've also seen claims that he did actually eat dog meat because he thought it would make him more virile. But good dogs do fuck a lot for sure. Yeah. But, you know, the sourcing on this is not great. And it has no relation to why he's called the dog meat general. So I don't want to make it clear. He's called the dog meat general because this dude, he spends so much time gambling like

half the descriptions of him that you read are just like from some diplomat or from like some high society person who just ran into him at a gambling den. Now, I'm just going to read out his list of the rest of his nicknames because like Lord Almighty, this dude has more nicknames than any other person I've ever heard of. Okay, his nicknames, the tiger, big tongue, blue sky, the dragon, the bearded bandit. Okay, big tongue. We got to take a second here. Why big tongue?

Half of these I have no idea. Okay. But it's really weird, he just every source has like a different thing of nicknames. Yeah, we'll explain some of them. Yeah, he has the dragon. I think the dragon is because he has like the, I don't know, he has some sort of complicated relationship to the dragon emperor that we're who's a mythological figure we're going to get to in a little bit.

He's called the red. Start that list again. The tiger, big tongue, blue sky, the dragon, the red bearded bandit, the monster, the lanky, the lanky general, the three doesn't knows warlord, 72 cannon Jong, the general with three long legs, old 86 and the long leg general. Yeah. Okay, we're going to get to that part in a second, but so he is second most famous name.

I mean, it sounds like he fucks from those nicknames. Yeah. It sounds like he fucks. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll do this, okay, so old 86. That one. Yeah.

So as you've gathered three, these are the last three, these ones are just about as dick. Old 86 is the most interesting one because supposedly it's because as dick is as long as a stack of 86 Mexican silver pesos. That's amazing. Now that just in brings up so many questions because we're again in China. So why is the peso anyone's go to for the size of the sky stick? So Mexican silver pesos have long been used in hard currency in China, dating back to the 1500s when the means insatiable demand for silver formed the base of the main currency

system that results in them importing a huge amount of the silver that that's that's removed from Spanish controlled mines in Latin America. So yeah, being dynasty, they do great things, your quality of life are also kind of responsible for all the genocides in Latin America. Not great. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

So to be fair, they didn't know where it was coming from, but yeah, they just needed to measure people's dicks. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, as sort of various currencies collapse in the world period, people keep using Mexican silver like pesos as coins are just worth their weight in silver. I'm I'm just I'm still I'm I'm still working through in my head the wow, the boss has a huge debt.

Hey, get some of that silver. I want to figure out exactly how this dick shakes out in pesos. So one of my one of my friends who has experience with Mexican coins from this period calculated that 86 pesos stack on top of each other means that this dude's dick is eight point eight inches long. Okay. That's that's believable. Yeah.

And you know, this is this is the kind of thing that like you'd expect. Okay, this is like the kind of myth making you'd expect to get from warlords. But like. Stunningly, this like seems to be true. Yeah. I mean, eight eight point six inches. If we're if he was like, yeah, he's got like a 14, 15 inch dick, I'd be like, OK, well, this sounds like some some Rasputin nonsense, but eight point six is like, yeah, it's pretty

good sized dick. But that's not like we're not talking outside of the realm of possibility here, especially for a dude as big as eight point six inches for a near seven feet is just kind of like. Yeah, that sounds like it sounds about right. Yeah. And he, you know, as you as you guess, this dude just fucks all the time. I guess I had gathered that from his nicknames. I'm pretty sure the tongue one is about fucking too.

Yeah, I think so. There's another one that's like famous, which is about the three doesn't know his general, which is because his most famous quote is that he doesn't know how many he doesn't know how many troops he has. He doesn't know how much money he has. And he doesn't know how many women he's having sex with at any given moment is the most warlord shit ever. I mean, you're not making being a warlord sound like a bad gig.

Yeah, you know, and this this this seems like as good a time as any to mention that this is the period where John starts traveling around with special train cars for his 42 concubines, the names of which he just didn't know. And thus, I mean, they're concubines. Yeah. Yeah, you're a warlord. I don't expect you to know anyone's name. Yeah, you know, you know, so so contrary to John, I spent a pretty good amount of time

trying to figure out who these women were. And there's there's just like a really depressing lack of interest in his women's lives just like across the whole academic literature, what I was able to find out about them was that half of them are Russians who came with the White Army. And the rest of them are either sort of Chinese, Japanese or American, but we don't really know how John got his hands on them. Yeah. These are a lot of foreign ladies got and that that's like one of the big things that

all of the sort of like media people pick up on is like, wow, he has like white prostitutes and it's like, OK. Oh, yeah, I'm sure that makes the news back in New York. Yeah. Yeah. Now, it's possible that some of these people have been sex workers in Shanghai, but it's also possible that John's troops and the White Russians do this literally all the time. Just literally like grab them off the street at random, because, you know, if this is this

we're starting to get at the downside of the boiler period, which is that like, yeah, so if you're like a woman, like a woman in the street of China, someone can just like grab you off the street and you're a concubine now. But you know, what I think is really depressing about this is like, like we don't know what the relationship to him was. All of the sources, they don't even agree as to like, like half of the sources call them concubines and half of them call them wives and like, we don't know if they're against their will, we don't know if they're getting paid, we just we don't know anything about

them. And it's extremely frustrating, especially because Zhang appears to have had kids with some of these women, but we don't know what happened to them. We don't know what happened to the women. We don't have to the kids. And you know, and there's a lot of other very weird stuff here. I saw some evidence that some of the dudes that Zhang was sleeping with were men, which implies that like he's bi, but again, this is one of those.

I mean, also, when you're that kind of powerful person, it's almost less about sexuality and more about just like power, like you just fuck people because they can't not fuck you because you're the warlord. I think that is some of these dudes, like it's almost not worth kind of trying to box them into a sexual category. It's kind of like how rape is less about sex than about power for this kind of person who power is everything for. It's just like he can, he just fucks.

Yeah. And there's a sort of interesting consequence of this, which is that like if you look at like Zhang's life, he kind of just turns into this just like physical embodiment of structural forces is like, OK, so like what is the patriarchy? Right? It's like, well, here is this dude whose whole thing is that he like he literally physically reduces women to numbers. And you get this with sort of in various different ways with like state violence, like the banking

system where like a lot of what Zhang sort of reveals is that it's just all of these systems are just a dude with a lot of guns. And yeah, you know, if you just give like a way, we're watching shit go down in Gaza right now. Yeah. All of the systems today are still just dudes with guns. Yes. We dress it up more or less.

Yeah. Well, really the only difference between it is the amount of legitimacy you have. And yeah, you know, this legitimacy problem is like this is a big thing for all the warlords and Zhang just doesn't try to solve it, which is what makes him unique. Everyone else is doing this like, oh, I do I plant gardens. I do public works. And Zhang's just like, nah, I'm just going to have fun. Yeah.

OK. Yeah. You know, the consequence of this, though, is while while Zhang's like jet sitting around with a train full of like maybe sex slaves, what's happening in Shandong, the province just had to control over is, oh, boy, some of it is pretty funny. Like so when he leaves his office every day when he's in Shandong, he he has like all the streets cleared and then he has a bunch of people like sprinkle clean water on the road to prepare, prepare, like prepare for him to walk on, which is just like this is some

great petty dictator shit. Like yeah. Yeah. And he also, you know, he doesn't think a lot of the kidders do, which is he starts issuing his own paper currency. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Is his face on it?

Well, so this is I couldn't find much about it because and the reason is for this is she just gets bored of it and stops printing it. And then after that, she starts making everyone use military stamps as money. Oh, man. I, you know, I'm on board with 80 percent of this guy, everything but the probable rape really. Yeah. You know, and I think this is this is this is what puts him like the fact that he's not

using his own currency that he's using military stamps. This is like what puts him like a tear above the rest of the world or the rest of the world or just like, whatever, I'll print my own money. But John's like, okay, so these stamps are made in Manchuria, which means I don't have to pay for them. I just get sent them. So if I use these stamps as money, I don't have to like spend the money to like make your own fake paper currency.

Hey, look, you don't, you don't get an army, lose an army and then get another army. And then lose another army and then get another army unless you're pragmatic. Yeah. And, you know, we can we can see some examples of pragmatism. So there's a famous story of like at one point a merchant is just like, these are stamps. This is not money. So John has a dude taken out of his shop, beaten and shot, which, you know, funnily enough, this is how states force originally forced people to use money.

And it like worked because yeah, yeah, it's like money money is the thing that like when the state asked you for it, you have to give them, like give it to them. Yeah. Yeah. And he also, so the other thing he starts doing in this period is he starts going to banks and just like pulling out guns and telling them to give him loans, which. Yeah. I mean, look, I am currently in the process of wanting to buy a house, but a lifetime

of shit credit is making that difficult. And I might do the same thing. It seems like a pretty good idea to be honest. This is one of his best ideas and it's great because I will pay the loan, but I am going to get it at gunpoint. Yeah. Fucking credit. Yes.

Absolutely. Yeah. The funny part about this, so there's like a bunch of banks in Shandong that have been open for like, like, like a lot, like a couple of hundred years and he drives like six of them out of business because he just like takes all of their money and loans. Well, unfortunately, now we have to come to the really bad stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

We've been having fun, but oh boy, I hate it when people do this to me because I normally do this to people. Yeah. It only took us like 14 pages. Yeah. So one of the most famous accounts of what's happening in Shandong from this period comes from a guy named Joseph Stillwell, who I need to mention at the outset, Stillwell, enormous racist, huge piece of shit.

He's a white guy in China in this period. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you need to tell me. Yeah. But like naturally, because he's incredibly racist and a piece of shit, he goes on to be an incredibly important American general in World War II who fights in the like the China and India theater.

So that's great. He's like still beloved in the U.S. for reasons, but you know, his accounts, his account of it like matches with other stuff I've seen. So I thought I'd start with that. So Stillwell's there, Stillwell's in Shandong in 1927. What he describes is these huge swaths the population made homeless by war, huddling together desperately in packed city streets without even a tent to shelter them at night. Bodies began to pile up on the streets, but there's no one to take them away and the corpses

stayed where they fell as famine ravaged the province. Zhong's solution, if it can be called that, to this problem of famine is industrial waste. So one of Manchuria's chief exports in this period were soybean cakes, which is it's basically like it's a bunch of mass of soybean that's been smushed together. And I want to say at the outset, so when I call these cakes, right, these are cakes in the sense that like cakes are uranium or cakes, like they're not food. This is an industrial product. And you know, what you do with them is that you, you know, you shift them to somewhere

else and then you squeeze the oil out of them and that that oil is used to make like it's using like a number of important industrial processes. And what at least behind is this even worse, like quote unquote cake that's it's waste material. People use it as fertilizer. Sometimes you use it to feed pigs. And this is what Zhong starts to import from Manchuria and used to feed the refugees. Yeah, like I need to reiterate this.

This is not food. This is an industrial waste product. It's edible in the sense that it will fill your stomach and temporarily stop hunger pangs without actually providing you with nutrition. Well, and it might just poison you because again, like these things are being just taken from a factory, right? Yeah. You know, and this is this is this is what's happening to the people that he's trying to

help. The people that he's not trying to help. So I think that the best way to sort of understand how brutal his army is in this period is that everywhere his army goes, it starts to change the leg, the language of the provinces, because every time they find a new way to murder someone, it gets popular. Like people have to come up with a new term for it. So for example, one of the one thing is the beginning of this is there's an expression that becomes popular called to cut apart to catch the light, which means like taking

a skull, splitting it in two and like exposing the insides of it to the sun. Okay. Yeah. And you know, the thing is like that, you know, you split you split enough skulls and it's like, okay, whatever. And so the troops get bored. And when they got bored with that account with another one, which is they would split skulls in half, like fully clean in half.

And then they'd find a telephone pole that's like connected by a wire to another telephone pole. And they'd hang the skulls on each end of the telephone pole at opposite ends of the wire with their ears like pressed up to the things that look like they were listening to the telephone. And this becomes so widespread, the phrase, he'd been made to listen to the telephone becomes like another popular expression in the province. Jesus, that's dark.

Yeah. It's, you know, this whole ran of terror became known as the steel sword policy after John's policy of just decapitating his political opponents and splitting their heads with swords. And when I say that one's pretty straightforward, but you know, when I say this is his policy, right? I mean, he is literally personally doing this. Like he is the guy holding the sword, chopping people's skulls open. Yeah, he's a man of action.

Yeah. And when you're when you're when you're six foot seven and you have a bunch of really sharp swords, like, yeah, you can, you know, again, he's making a lot of calls I too would make in his situation. Yeah. And there's, you know, there's, there's, I think, I think you will also appreciate this one as a member of the press. So very early on when he first takes power, one of the earliest instances they said the

steel sword policy is there's an editor of a newspaper who like publishes an article criticizing him. Oh, that's not a good idea. Yeah. He's a newspaper editor, dragged out of his office and shot in the street. And then like, you know, after that, all these papers sort of stopped criticizing him. Now, I should mention this. What Jong and his men are doing here is not just random violence.

Jong has the same legitimate legitimacy problem that every other warlord does. And his solution to it essentially is to cut the Goryean knot and kill anyone who opposes him in ways so public and so violent that no one would ever dare do it again. Okay. And this has a devastating effect on the population in Shandong. The effects of constant warfare, bandits, droughts, and locusts combined with the sheer brutality of Jong's extraction of wealth to leave four to nine million people, like including my family, by the way, who are in this province in the period, on the brink

of starvation, which luckily. That part's not read. You know. Yeah. But, you know, well, it's nice to have a family connection to a story. Yeah. Yeah. And I had some records from that period.

And I was like, I'm not going to read these like I'm just not. Yeah. It seems like it would be pretty. Yeah. Yeah. And so while the masses ate fertilizer to stay alive, Jong was partying with an endless succession of local sycophants who laughed at his every word for a chance to turn a chunk of his favor into a chunk of his stolen wealth.

He was gambling, fucking constantly, just completely wasted literally all the time, like driving around with this like person personalized Belgian dining set and his personalized train with a bunch of women taken from like who knows where he's having the absolute time of his life. Yeah. And that that's the image I'm going to leave you with today. Jong, Jong, Jong living out his wildest dreams. Being the kings.

Yeah. While the people of China died in droves around him. And in part two, we're going to see what happens when it increasingly out of touch ruling class leases people to die in murderism in the streets when they protest. Because in part two, those ordinary people are going to start to fight back. Well, that's your foot was off the Internet for a while. Look, well, Chris, this has been a great episode. I'm still more on this guy's side than not because I love me a warlord.

And it sounds like he's doing he's doing the right thing, right? He's living it up, committing horrible crimes against humanity, drunk off his ass, just just just being a being a king about it. So I don't know. I'm excited to see where this guy goes. Yeah. Do you have any plugables to plug? Yeah.

So I guess I'm I'm it me CHR three or the essence be destroyed dude on Twitter. Yeah, I have a sub stack called the long 21st century, which I I swear I do occasionally post to it that I'm also not a turf. Yeah. Great. Great. All right. Well, we will be back with more of this guy and more of a horrible war crimes.

I'm going to guess more horrible war crimes, Chris. Yeah. If anything, they get worse. Yeah. Well, check in for that. And remember, if you're going to be a warlord, you kind of got to go all the way alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

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