Although I had always been fascinated by the stories of China’s regional military strongmen, this passion and curiosity did not crystalise into academic interest until 2015, when I was working at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Cologne, as a research associate. The Institute’s rich collection of Chinese-language books and materials allowed me to carry out initial research into the history of Chinese warlordism – a history that had long been regarded as messy, complicated, and reactionary. After I took up a post as lecturer at the history department of the University of Exeter in 2016, I started to develop my ideas about how to reappraise this history and was determined to establish a research project. The erstwhile head of department, Prof. Richard Toye, affirmed my thoughts and firmly supported my project at its initial and critical stages. Prof. Arne Westad of Yale University, who had provided generous support for my previous research on Chinese women intellectuals’ political networks in the Second World War, again, offered me precious advice and help through every step of this new academic journey. Without their encouragement, advice, and support, it would have been difficult for me to proceed with archival visits in Guangdong, Hunan, Nanjing, and Beijing and obtain both internal and external funding.
Between 2017 and 2019, with internal funding provided by the history department of the University of Exeter, I completed multiple archival research visits in China. In the summer of 2018, supported by the UK-China Humanities Alliance Early Career Researcher Fellowship, I explored the rare collections of the National Library of China as well as Za Shu Guan, a private library and archive located in the suburb of Beijing, and tightened my academic connections with scholars at Beijing University. One of the turning points of this project was undoubtedly my talk on Chen Jiongming at the China Centre of the University of Oxford in June 2018, when Prof. Henrietta Harrison made the comment that the value of the project lay in its linking between the historiography of warlordism and that of the May Fourth. Her comment helped me to identify the historiographical underpinning of this project and pronounce, in the introduction of this book, the significance of understanding the relationships between the men of guns and men of letters in a pivotal historical period of Chinese state-building.
Before the book manuscript was completed, I had published some of my research findings as articles in two academic journals, namely “Not Just a Man of Guns: Chen Jiongming, Warlord, and the May Fourth Intellectual (1919–1922)” in Journal of Chinese History Vol. 4 Issue 1 (2020): 161–185 and “Making the ‘Good Government’ with the ‘Good People’: Collaboration between General Wu Peifu
It has been such a wonderful academic journey improving and completing my project along with the abovementioned colleagues, editors, and reviewers. Their insights and supports are certainly forever invaluable to me, but it is their enthusiasm, absolute dedication and meticulous attitude towards academic research that have touched me the most and reminded me, once and again, how lucky I am to have become a member of this academic community.