Speaking of Chen Jiongming, many people first think of a negative image, and what "revolutionary rebel general", "reactionary warlord", "careerist" and so on are all titles he has been given. In most history textbooks, he also appears as a reflection of Mr. Sun Wen.
The main reason for this result is that Chen Jiongming was the biggest threat to the national government in Guangzhou at the beginning of its establishment, Mr. Sun Wen's presidential palace was also shelled by his subordinates, and the two crusades of the Whampoa Military Academy were also aimed at attacking him. In this way, neither Mr. Sun Wen nor the later Chiang Kai-shek would hold any praise for him.
But there is a very strange place, Chen Jiongming does not rely on the shadow of his ancestors, he can dominate Guangdong is completely his own hard work. If he is a useless man, how can he do this?
In fact, Chen Jiongming is also a personal character, and Mr. Sun Wen and Mr. Sun Wen still had years of working together in the early years, but unfortunately, the last two did not agree in their ideas, and finally the swords and soldiers met.
Chen Jiongming was born in Haifeng, Guangdong in 1878, his father Chen Hanxiang is a well-known local rich businessman, because of such a superior family, Chen Jiongming was very naughty when he was a child, playing and fighting with a group of people all day, and was not interested in reading.
It wasn't until after the death of his most beloved grandfather that Chen Jiongming remembered his grandfather's teachings that he had made him study well, and he did not study seriously.
Sometimes things are so unpredictable, when he doesn't want to learn, everything is good, and when he wants to learn, there are many more obstacles. His father's business encountered setbacks at this time, and the Chen family began to decline, and Chen Jiongming had to put the hope of revitalizing the family above the imperial examination.
In 1899, Chen Jiongming passed the examination for Xiucai, but later in the process of studying in Guangzhou, he came into contact with a lot of Western ideas, and gradually he found that the Qing Dynasty was crumbling, and it was useless to take the meritorious name, so he decided to take another path.
In 1906, the year after the Qing court abolished the imperial examination, Chen Jiongming was admitted to the Guangdong Law and Politics School, and after graduating with honors, he became a member of the Guangdong Provincial Advisory Council.
At this time, he was extremely active in politics, proposing 15 bills in two years, which is one-tenth of the bills of the Guangdong Consultative Bureau.
The bills he proposed were very practical and constructive, such as the "Case of Eliminating the Backlog of Defects in the Ministry of Public Affairs", the "Abolition of the Ordinance on the Spot", and the "Case of Preparing for the Construction of the Huihu Railway", which are all conducive to the people's livelihood. But no matter how he mentioned it, other superiors and colleagues only responded to a few words in a hurry, and they could not change the social status quo at all.
Therefore, Chen Jiongming understood the weakness of the administrative staff in that situation, and his heart sprouted that he wanted to embark on the road of armed revolution.
In 1909, Chen Jiongming joined the League, and began to secretly contact the New Army to prepare for the next move.
In October 10, 1911, the revolutionaries launched an uprising in Wuchang and quickly recaptured Hubei, a successful first case that inspired revolutionaries across the country, and Chen Jiongming, Deng Zhongyuan and others also decided to respond in Tamsui, Huizhou.
On November 11, Chen Jiongming and Deng Zhongyuan led more than 100 peasants and craftsmen to successfully capture Tamsui, and with this victory paving, many local people chose to invest in their troops, and soon Chen Jiongming's men gathered more than 8,000 people. He organized these men into 7 brigades, and then sent troops to take Huizhou.
After successive "snowballs," the number of the nationalist army under Chen Jiongming's command reached more than 10,000 people, and in order to make the troops combat effective, Chen Jiongming reorganized the troops into 7 brigades, and he made himself commander-in-chief and Deng Hao as chief of staff, and began to go in the direction of the regular army.
Huizhou has an ancient name called Xunzhou, so Chen Jiongming's troops are also known as Xunjun, which is the foundation of his later growth.
At the same time as Chen Jiongming succeeded in Huizhou, other revolutionaries also regained other cities in Guangdong, and Hu Hanmin, then head of the southern branch of the League, was elected as the governor of Guangdong.
Unfortunately, Hu Hanmin, the governor of Guangdong, was very depressed, he was only famous and not good at military affairs, and he had no soldiers in his hands and could not command the powerful factions in other places.
In order not to turn himself into an empty shelf, Hu Hanmin urgently needed a revolutionary with military strength to cooperate. Thinking about it, he found Chen Jiongming.
Therefore, under the strong recommendation of Hu Hanmin, Chen Jiongming served as the deputy governor of Guangdong, and on November 28, Chen Jiongming arrived in Guangzhou with 7,000 xun troops.
In this short period of more than a month, Chen Jiongming was simply a surprise, and he jumped from the leader of a small group of rebels with only more than a hundred people under his command to the second in command of Guangdong, which can be described as a spring breeze.
Not even a month after Chen Jiongming entered Guangzhou, Hu Hanmin went to Nanjing to assist Mr. Sun Wen in forming the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, so Chen Jiongming, the deputy governor, became the acting governor and actually held the supreme military and political power in Guangdong.
During his first administration of Guangdong, Chen Jiongming still implemented many effective policies, vigorously eliminating bandits, developing industry, commerce, and education, prohibiting gambling and opium consumption, and so on, which to a certain extent improved Guangdong's economy and public order.
At the same time, he also did a mixed reputation - disarmament, laying down the civilian army that was not subordinate to him.
At the beginning of his tenure as governor, the nationalist army in Guangzhou was as high as 51 and numbered nearly 150,000 people, and in order to ensure his absolute rule, Chen Jiongming disbanded all the nationalist armies that he could not control.
This did alleviate the financial strain of the Guangdong government a lot, but his methods were too rough, which caused dissatisfaction among many people, and this disarmament that excluded dissidents seriously damaged the image of the revolutionary army.
It was also in this process that the differences between Chen Jiongming and Sun Yat-sen grew, and what Sun Yat-sen hoped to unify the country through armed struggle was equivalent to tearing down and recasting the old society.
Chen Jiongming, on the other hand, hopes to implement democratic federalism through peaceful means, first to make Guangdong a model, to attract other provinces to follow suit, and eventually the whole country will use the new model of unification, but the provinces will still maintain a high degree of autonomy.
The revolutionary lines of the two men were different, so gradually some contradictions arose.
In 1913, Mr. Sun Wen led the second revolution, and although Chen Jiongming did not agree with it, he still participated in it and led Guangdong Province to declare independence from Beiyang. When Mr. Sun Wen saw his response, he appointed him as the deputy commander of the Northern Expedition.
Chen Jiongming organized two divisions and a brigade totaling 14,000 people in the Northern Expedition within ten days, but at that time the Beiyang Army was still relatively strong, so Chen Jiongming's troops were quickly defeated. Coupled with the fact that one of his division commanders was bribed to defect, Chen Jiongming had to flee to Hong Kong.
I don't know if he resented Sun Wen's second revolution and caused him to lose his foundation, Chen Jiongming went to Hong Kong and established the China Water Conservancy Promotion Society, competing with Sun Wen's Chinese Revolutionary Party.
Chen Jiongming knew that in order to gain a foothold in the chaotic world, it was not enough to rely on a political party alone, so he returned to Huizhou Tamsui not long after. After Yuan Shikai became emperor, he found the opportunity to raise an army against Yuan again.
He himself had a very good popular base in Huizhou, and Yuan Shikai's perverse behavior was unpopular, so in a very short period of time, more than 10,000 people followed Chen Jiongming.
After occupying the Huizhou area, Chen Jiongming reorganized his troops into 10 routes and 18 detachments and renamed it the Yue Army, and he made himself commander-in-chief.
Although the number of Chen Jiongming's men did not change much, by this time Guangdong was already occupied by Lu Rongting of the Gui clan. The number of Gui troops exceeded 100,000, which was far from being comparable to Chen Jiongming's Cantonese army.
Therefore, Chen Jiongming cleverly chose to liberate himself and retain the military power, reorganizing the Cantonese army under his command into 20 battalions of the provincial guard army, and retaining it under the guise of legality, while he himself was relieved of his commanding position and went north to Beijing to secretly manipulate this unit.
In 1917, there was another restoration farce in China, Zhang Xun's braided army entered Beijing to support Puyi, so Mr. Sun Wen once again protected the law and established the Republic of China Military Government in Guangzhou, and Chen Jiongming was also appointed as the commander-in-chief of the First Army of the Republic of China Military Government.
Now that he had a name, Chen Jiongming took the 20 battalions into his hands again, and because of the strength of the Gui army, Chen Jiongming took more than 10,000 troops into Fujian, occupied 26 counties in southern Fujian after several major battles with the Fujian warlords, and established the Southern Fujian Protectorate Area centered on Zhangzhou.
I have to say that Chen Jiongming's governance ability is still good, and in the two years he was in charge of Zhangzhou, he carried out vigorous construction of the local area, making the Zhangzhou New Deal famous throughout the country. Unfortunately, the land in Zhangzhou was barren, and even if he had the ability, it would be impossible to build this place into Shanghai, and the people would not be able to collect taxes, and even maintaining the army would become a difficult task.
Under such circumstances, the Cantonese army under Chen Jiongming wanted to return to Guangdong. In June 1919, the Yunnan and Gui warlords engaged in a scuffle in northern Guangdong, which was a good time, and Sun Yat-sen also ordered Chen Jiongming to hurry back to Guangdong, but Chen Jiongming did not act in the future.
It was not until 1920 that Lu Rongting, with the support of the Beiyang direct family, wanted to completely eliminate Chen Jiongming's department, that Chen Jiongming decided to fight.
On August 12, Chen Jiongming raised troops from Zhangzhou and returned to Guangdong in three ways, and his subordinates knew that the trip was home, so the morale of each spirit was high. At this time, although the Gui army was large, it was already corrupt internally, so it was beaten and defeated.
On October 28, the Cantonese army captured Guangzhou, and Lu Rongting, seeing that nothing could be done, retreated to Guangxi, ending his five-year rule.
This result made Chen Jiongming and Mr. Sun Wen very excited, but soon the two broke out into an argument. In the name of the Kuomintang premier, Mr. Sun Wen appointed Chen Jiongming as the governor of Guangdong Province and the commander-in-chief of the Cantonese Army, hoping that the latter would continue to attack until the reunification of the whole country.
But Chen Jiongming is not interested in this, this is also very normal, if it is not the knife on the neck, perhaps he will not return to Guangdong, compared to the whole country, he is more concerned about the acre and three points of land under his rule, so in the Northern Expedition organized by Mr. Sun Wen in 1922, Chen Jiongming did not send a single soldier, but also secretly obstructed.
On June 16 of that year, Chen Jiongming's general Ye Ju led his troops to shell Sun Wen's presidential palace, resulting in the failure of the Northern Expedition and completely tearing the faces of both sides.
After the incident, Chen Jiongming set up a separate government in Guangzhou, but his rule did not last long. Because he only had more than 30,000 people under his command at that time, and the other forces in Guangdong combined to more than 60,000 troops, he was morally untenable.
At the end of the year, Mr. Sun Wen contacted Xu Chongzhi, Li Fulin, Huang Dawei and others to form an East Road Thief Army to attack Chen Jiongming, and soon Yang Ximin, Shen Hongying, Liu Zhenhuan and other powerful factions also responded to Sun Wen.
The last time Chen Jiongming beat Lu Rongting and retreated, the object of this defeat was replaced by Chen Jiongming himself. His two division commanders, Liang Hongkai and Chen Zhangfu, also chose to support Sun Wen under such circumstances. Seeing that the crowd was about to rebel and leave, Chen Jiongming sent a telegram to the wilderness and led 20,000 remnants to retreat to Huizhou.
Chen Jiongming had hoped that as usual, he would find an opportunity to take charge of Guangdong again, but Sun Wen already understood his threat, so after quelling the rebellion of the Shang Group, he decided to completely eliminate Chen Jiongming's forces before proceeding to the Northern Expedition.
The Crusading Army, with the huangpu teachers and students as the backbone, attacked Chen Jiongming twice and successfully crushed the latter.
Chen Jiongming had no choice but to flee to Hong Kong to settle down, and he also co-opted some people to organize the China Zhi Gong Party and put forward the "Three Construction Doctrines" of the founding of the People's Republic, the Founding of Asia, and the Founding of the World to oppose Sun Wen's Three People's Principles. However, it is useless, and the presence of this party is extremely low.
Chen Jiongming died of illness in Hong Kong in 1933 at the age of 55.
However, objectively speaking, Chen Jiongming's character is still OK, he and Sun Wen are purely incompatible with political views, in 1925 Sun Wen died of illness, he also sent a letter, writing "Only heroes can kill people alive, merit and crime, there are thousands of autumns and young history; and the old friends have fought again and again, public hatred and private friendship, all by an inch of red heart." ”
He had ruled Guangdong twice, but he was not as brutal as the old warlords, and he was particularly honest as an official. On the private side, even the opponent can't find a point to criticize. After his death, he had no money left in his family, and he could not afford to buy a coffin, so he borrowed his mother's coffin and buried it.
The big guy on the side of the game, ending up with such an ending, is also regrettable.