The Liu Family in the Republican Period

After Liu Xianshi's 1911 march from Xingyi county to Guiyang he no longer functioned as a member of the local elite. From this point on, Liu Xianshi's attention was not focused on Xingyi's local affairs but on the broader struggle for provincial and national power. Only in 1925 did he finally retire to Xingyi after being forced from power by a military rival, and less than two years later he was dead. Although Liu's career as a warlord is beyond the scope of this study, it is perhaps fitting to look briefly at the effects of Liu's political success on his family and its Xingyi power base.

One of the most obvious effects of Liu Xianshi's rise was the opportunity it gave him to obtain official posts for other family members. The loss of effective central control over local and provincial appointments after the 1911 Revolution opened the way for a degree of nepotism by Republican period power holders that would have been unimaginable under the imperial system. Liu Xianzhi, on his brother's insistence, was "elected" as a Guizhou national assemblyman and served for many years as his brother's political

representative in Beijing.^[86] Liu Xianqian held a series of high Guizhou military posts as well as important civil positions including a circuit intendancy and even, for a time, Guizhou's civil governorship.^[87] Wang Wenhua, the nephew who acted as Liu's intermediary during the 1911 Revolution, rose under Liu's patronage to the position of division commander in the Guizhou army.^[88] Wang's brother-in-law, He Yingqin, also held a number of posts in the Guizhou army including brigade commander and chief of staff.^[89] Wang Wenhua's older brother, Wang Boqun, held a circuit intendancy in Guizhou after the 1911 Revolution and then served as Liu's official emissary on a number of political missions.^[90]

Although Liu Xianshi's patronage was essential for the initial posts received by his relatives, many of them used these positions as stepping stones for official careers independent of Liu's direct influence. Liu Xianshi's son, Liu Gangwu, made contacts within the Nationalist Party while serving as his father's emissary to Sun Yatsen, and, after his father's death, obtained a series of posts in the Nationalist government.^[91] After leading a Guizhou expeditionary force into Sichuan, Wang Wenhua emerged as an autonomous warlord in his own right. He Yingqin eventually left the Guizhou army to take a post as an instructor at the Whampoa Academy in Canton and then became a leading Nationalist general. As a result of extensive social and political contacts made early in his career, Wang Boqun obtained many posts from the Nationalist government in the 1920s, culminating in an appointment as minister of communications.^[92] It is highly unlikely, however, that any of these men would have achieved these positions without the original impetus of their relationship to Liu Xianshi.

In traditional Chinese society, elite families saw official posts as a means to replenish family wealth and status. Under the imperial system, however, the direct combination of official and local family power was prevented by the "law of avoidance" that kept an official from holding an office in his home province. This principle was abandoned after the 1911 Revolution, as exemplified in Liu's own rise to provincial power, and this change added an extra dimension to the benefits of officeholding in the Republican period. In the late Qing, the Lius had to apply much money and effort to cultivate relationships with provincial officials to protect their local position. Once Liu Xianshi assumed control over provincial administration, however, his family's local interests were not only freed from official interference but also placed under official protection. Indeed, to watch over the family's power base, Liu Xianqian often held west Guizhou military or civil posts, which gave him direct authority over the Xingyi area.^[93] While Liu Xianshi remained in power, his family's dominant position in Xingyi was unchallengeable.

The manner in which Liu Xianshi's official position could be used to protect local family interests, however, suggests a subtle change in the importance of the Lius' local base to their family power. In the late Qing, the Lius'

Xingyi base was the family's main source of both military and economic power. After 1911, more important sources of power came from outside Xingyi. For example, the family's military power originally came solely from its Xingyi-recruited forces. In the Republican period, family members in Xingyi still maintained their local military power, at times using this power to bolster the family's broader political interests; for instance, Liu Xianqian's 1912 attack on Zhang Bailin with Xingyi militia forces. Another example can be seen in 1923 when Liu Xianshi recovered Guizhou's governorship with Yunnan assistance after a two-year fall from power: a local force from Xingyi, led by one of Liu's nephews, joined the vanguard of Yunnan troops escorting Liu back to Guiyang.^[94] Nonetheless, while Liu Xianshi ruled as governor he had the military resources of the whole province at his disposal. In this period, this greater military power, not the family's local militia, contributed more to the family's overall position.

A similar change in the sources of Liu family wealth can also be seen in the Republic period. By 1911 the Liu family was already one of the wealthiest landlord families in southwestern Guizhou. In the Republican period, however, the family's total landholdings exceeded four thousand mu , making the Lius possibly the largest landlord family in all of Guizhou. Given the extravagant life-style of the Liu family in Xingyi, reported in the Republican period, it is unlikely that this leap in landed wealth came solely from the frugal reinvestment of the profits from previous holdings.^[95] Rather, it suggests new external sources of wealth that no doubt also derived largely from office holding. In the Republic, as under the empire, official wealth came not from salaries, which remained quite low, but from graft. For warlords like Liu Xianshi, authorities unto themselves, the opportunities for personal profit were in general limited only by the size of the public treasury. Although records on this type of graft were seldom kept or made public, some reports reveal the sums the Lius were able to extract from their public offices: During a 1916 political crisis, Liu Xianshi sent more than four hundred thousand yuan , reportedly taken from the Guizhou treasury, to Shanghai to serve as a personal emergency fund in case he lost power.^[96] In two separate cases, Liu Xianzhi and Liu Xianqian were each accused of embezzling two hundred thousand yuan in public funds.^[97] Even granting some bias in these reports, they suggest the amount of wealth the Lius were able to acquire from their positions. There is no question that much of his wealth eventually found it way back to Xingyi, where it was invested in the family's growing estates.

Liu Xianshi's fall from power in 1925 did have some impact on the Lius' local power base in Xingyi because it removed the political shield of invulnerability that his position had provided for family interests. There had been no such danger to the family's Xingyi base in his earlier loss of power from late 1920 to 1923 because in that case he had been ousted by troops loyal to his nephew, Wang Wenhua, in what was to some extent an intrafamily

conflict.^[98] In 1925, however, Liu was forced out by an unfriendly rival who decided to establish a military presence in Xingyi county under the guise of a bandit pacification campaign. The Liu family tried to resist this intrusion into their base with disastrous results. The Xiawutun fortress fell to the invading army, and the Lius' military forces were disarmed and disbanded. A large store of weapons the Lius had hoarded at Xiawutun (enough to arm two regiments) was also confiscated, along with a large quantity of the family's accumulated "loot." ^[99] Liu Xianshi's 1925 fall thus meant the decline of not only the family's provincial political influence but also its local base.

In the end, however, the Liu family landholdings were so extensive and its social status so high that even the 1925 disaster was only a temporary setback that could not undermine the family's dominant position in Xingyi county. Of course, some members of Liu family, such as Liu Gangwu (who never returned home after his father's death), had official careers that drew them more or less permanently away from the Xingyi area. But other members of the family remained in the county to husband the family's interests and continue the family's tradition of local leadership. For example, several of Liu Xianshi's nephews later held district head (quzhang ) posts in Xingyi and thus maintained the family's influence over local administration. In the 1930s and 1940s, Liu family leadership in Xingyi was primarily assumed by one of Liu Xianshi's nephews, Liu Gongliang, who had become Liu Xianshi's trusted secretary in his last years as governor and had followed his uncle back to Xingyi after his fall. There he upheld family traditions by his involvement in many local affairs, including a special emphasis on local defense. During the Red Army's passage through the area in 1934, Liu Gongliang helped organize an anticommunist defense committee, directed the construction of fortifications throughout the county, collected arms and funds for local defense, and trained local militiamen. Much like descriptions of the Liu family's "small court" in the late Qing, Liu Gongliang came to be seen as Xingyi county's "de facto magistrate."^[100] Only the coming of the Communist revolution in 1949 ended the Liu family's century of local power.