General Xu Shuzheng

Xu Shuzheng — known as 'Little Xu' to distinguish him from President Xu Shichang — was born in Anhui in 1880, trained in Japan at the Shikan Gakko military academy, and rose as the closest lieutenant and strategist of Duan Qirui, the dominant figure of China's Anhui clique. He was an unusually intellectual warlord politician: a founder of the Anfu Club that controlled parliament, a poet and dramatist, and the architect of the Japanese-funded War Participation Army that Duan built in 1918 under cover of joining the First World War.

That army needed a mission. With Russia in civil war and unable to enforce the 1915 Kyakhta settlement, Beijing saw an opening in Outer Mongolia. Xu was appointed Commissioner for the Northwestern Frontier and in October 1919 arrived in Urga with troops. He pressured the Mongolian government and the higher lamas into petitioning for the abolition of autonomy, then had the petition accepted in Beijing in November 1919.

The manner of it mattered more than the fact. Xu staged ceremonies calculated to humiliate: the Bogd Khan's state seals were confiscated, Mongolian officials were made to kowtow to the Chinese flag and to a portrait of the president, and the monarch was placed under effective house arrest at the Green Palace. Mongolian nationalists who had been divided about Chinese suzerainty were united by the insult, and the underground groups that became the Mongolian People's Party formed in direct response.

Xu's triumph lasted months. The Anhui clique lost the Zhili–Anhui War in July 1920; he was dismissed, briefly took refuge in the Japanese legation, and never recovered his position, though he continued to travel and intrigue abroad. On 30 December 1925 he was seized from a train near Langfang and shot on the orders of Feng Yuxiang, in revenge for Xu's execution of Feng's uncle Lu Jianzhang seven years earlier. By then the Mongolia he had occupied was a Soviet-aligned republic.