2026-06-26 –, Room 302 (Seats 48)
This paper centers on a sensational gossip story that was circulated in the Shanghai daily "Shibao" in 1930: an elopement and falling out between a the daughter of minor warlords Zhao Hengti and her father’s gigolo that resulted in the latter’s suicide. Given the dearth of corroborating evidence for such a spectacular event, I suggest this tawdry episode should be understood as a moral fable aimed to critique warlord excess and lament the disintegration of the Confucian family. What mattered was less the truth of the affair than its plausibility for a public eager to learn of domestic degeneracy in warlord families that matched the general perception of political corruption.
This episode does not only constitute a rich text wherein questions of masculinity, generational authority, and political legitimacy were negotiated in Warlord China. It echoes other stereotypes of the period’s larger-than-life figures, such as Christian General Feng Yuxiang, who supposedly baptized his soldiers with a firehose, or Dogmeat General Zhang Zongchang, whose supposed ignorance over the specifics of his army were legendary. Examining the lives, gossip, and sources surrounding Feng, Zhang, and Zhao (and their reputations) illustrates the manner in which much ‘history’ about this period in modern Chinese history is based on mere innuendo, and encourages responsible historians to reexamine their preconceived notions of how the era truly functioned.
China, Warlord, Media, Masculinity, Gossip, History
Jonathan Tang is a Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. He earned his PhD in Twentieth-Century Chinese History from the department of History at UC Berkeley and is a specialist in China’s modern “Warlord Era,” the short period between the fall of the imperial system and the rise of the centralized party-state.