Tracing back to the source, Yuan Shikai himself was a subordinate of Wu Changqing, the leader of Huai warlord Li Hongzhang. The backbone of the small station training is the "Dingwu Army" of the Huai Army bureaucratic training. Most of the generals of the "new army" are graduates of Li Hongzhang's Tianjin Naval Academy and Beiyang Military Academy.
After Yuan Shikai came to power, in order to further control the army, he tried his best to form his own team, recruit talents and install cronies, so that the generals he served could reuse Yuan and become his loyal minions. In particular, Yuan Shikai used methods such as recruiting semes or proteges for military school graduates to drive them. For ordinary soldiers, they instigated party member to carry out propaganda and described Yuan as everyone's patron and "food and clothing parents". Even in each battalion, Yuan's immortal memorial tablet was set up for the soldiers to worship, so that the soldiers only knew that loyalty to Yuan Shikai was their bounden duty.
In this way, the Beiyang New Army finally evolved into the forbidden area of Yuan Shikai-the Beiyang Warlord reactionary clique. This regiment and its predecessor showed two completely different marks in the history of modern China military development.
As far as the private subordination of feudal warlords is concerned, Chiang Kai-shek is even worse than Yuan Shikai. As mentioned earlier, in order to strengthen the control of the army, the Nanjing National Government headed by Chiang Kai-shek used China's traditional culture and customary forces to instill the teaching of the rule of law, and gradually woven an invisible and infinite trap in the army. Under the slogan "It is the first duty of a soldier to obey orders", all soldiers are loyal to the Chiang family.
For a long time, Chiang Kai-shek tried his best to strengthen his own army with the Huangpu department as the core, bought off dissidents by disintegration and corruption, and expanded Chiang Kai-shek's armed forces.
In order to further control the army, the Kuomintang implemented the barbaric "Left-wing League Law" and "Guarantee Law", stipulating that all conscripts and military schools must have a local Jiabao or clan leader as a guarantor; In the army, officers and men must "take care of each other, sit together and get involved", and one person breaks the law. Everyone is involved and no one can get out. This is the resurrection of the backward primitive clan system under the new conditions, and it is the flood of warlordism in the modern army.
Not only that, Chiang Kai-shek also used fascism to exaggerate militarism and demanded that all soldiers "absolutely trust the commander-in-chief and obey orders" in order to achieve "success or death." It integrates primitive clan system, feudal traditional consciousness and western fascism, and is the main feature of Kuomintang's new warlordism. This is enough to show that the modernization of the Kuomintang army has made greater achievements than that of the new army in the late Qing Dynasty, but it has left the crux of the disease that is difficult to diagnose and treat!
Mao Zedong once pointed out that democracy is a powerful weapon to eradicate warlordism. Since its birth, the people's army has relied on this weapon to counter the residual influence of warlordism.
In the long war years, the People's Army persisted in implementing a democratic system internally, devoted itself to army building with a democratic spirit, and created the basic forms of army democracy unique to the People's Army, such as the three major democracies of politics, economy and military, which was an important guarantee for the People's Army to always adhere to the collective leadership of the China * * * Party and always engage in the magnificent cause of the proletariat.
The historical process of China's military modernization has proved by irrefutable facts that military modernization must be combined with advanced classes and advanced ideas. Only when the army building represents the interests of the people and conforms to the development trend of the times can it have vitality. In sharp contrast with the new army and the Kuomintang army in the late Qing Dynasty, the people's army under the leadership of China's * * * production party was in an extremely difficult and difficult environment and was in danger of being annihilated at any time, but it was still developing forward and finally completed the great transformation from guerrilla to regular army.
The most fundamental reason is that this army adheres to the leadership of China's Producer Party, the proletarian nature of the people's army, and the theoretical basis with Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the guiding ideology. This is impossible for all reactionary troops. The People's Army was born in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, and developed and strengthened in the desperate struggle against extremely powerful enemies-the Kuomintang army and foreign aggression forces; The modernization of the people's army is precisely along the road that the Chinese nation overthrew darkness, got rid of poverty and became one of the nations in the world.