Coordination Without Authority: Zhang Zuolin and the Fengtian Clique

In the summer of 1928, a train carrying Zhang Zuolin wound through the mountains northeast of Beijing. He was returning to Manchuria after another failed attempt to hold the capital. The Nationalists were advancing. His coalition was fraying. The Japanese, who had financed his rise, were growing impatient with his independence.

Somewhere near Huanggutun, the train passed under a bridge. A bomb detonated. Zhang Zuolin died hours later, never regaining consciousness.

The man who planted the bomb was a Japanese officer named Komoto Daisaku. He believed Zhang had outlived his usefulness. In a sense, he was right - within three years, the Japanese would invade Manchuria outright, sweeping away the entire system Zhang had built.

But for nearly two decades before that bomb, a former bandit with no formal education had controlled one of the most strategically contested regions in Asia. He commanded 300,000 troops, negotiated with the Japanese as an equal, and built a coalition that survived civil wars, betrayals, and the collapse of imperial China.

How?

Zhang Zuolin started his career robbing travelers in rural Liaoning in the 1890s. This was not unusual. The late Qing dynasty was hemorrhaging authority, and the northeast was filling up with bandits, refugees, and opportunists of every variety. What made Zhang different was a simple insight that most outlaws missed: legitimacy is cheaper than violence.

In 1902, instead of fighting the Qing military forces sent to suppress him, Zhang offered his services. He rebranded his gang as a local militia. The dynasty, too weak to pacify the region by force, accepted. A bandit became a commander.

This pattern would repeat throughout his career. When the Qing fell, Zhang didn’t declare independence or join the revolutionaries. He waited, assessed the new landscape, and allied with whoever seemed most likely to leave him alone. By 1916, he was military governor of Fengtian province. By 1926, he controlled Beijing itself.

The conventional narrative frames this as military conquest - a warlord fighting his way to the top. But Zhang’s army, while large, was never the strongest in China. He won through a different kind of warfare.

The Fengtian clique was less a government than a syndicate.

Picture the structure: Zhang at the center, surrounded by a ring of semi-autonomous governors, generals, and fixers. Wu Junsheng controlled the northern railways and the province of Heilongjiang. Tang Yulin held Rehe and managed the Mongolian frontier. Yang Yuting served as chief of staff but also ran his own network of Japanese contacts and arms deals. Zhang’s own son, Zhang Xueliang, commanded the modernized units and the fledgling air force.

None of these men worked for Zhang in the way an employee works for a company. They were partners in an enterprise. They kept most of what they collected in their territories - sometimes 60 or 70 percent of local taxes. They made their own deals, cultivated their own clients, built their own power bases.

What they couldn’t do alone was survive.

Manchuria in the 1920s was surrounded by threats. The Nationalists wanted to reunify China. The Japanese wanted to colonize Manchuria. Soviet Russia wanted influence over the railways. Rival warlords wanted territory. Any single governor, acting independently, would have been crushed.

Zhang’s value was coordination. He could broker deals with the Japanese that no provincial governor could negotiate alone. He could mobilize the collective military strength of the coalition against external threats. He could arbitrate disputes between members before they escalated into civil war.

The governors stayed loyal not because Zhang could punish defection - he often couldn’t - but because defection was expensive. Leave the coalition and you lose access to Japanese loans. You lose the protection of the collective army. You lose your reputation as a reliable partner, which matters enormously in a world where trust is scarce and contracts are unenforceable.

Zhang understood something about power that formal political theory often misses: authority and influence are not the same thing.

He had no legal claim to Manchuria. Beijing, when it functioned at all, considered him a rebel. The international community recognized the Republic of China, not the Fengtian clique. On paper, Zhang was nobody.

But paper didn’t matter. What mattered was that when Zhang suggested a course of action, people followed. When he withdrew favor from someone, their position became precarious. When he signaled support - attending a banquet, sending a gift, arranging a marriage - careers advanced.

This is soft power in its purest form. Zhang rarely issued direct orders. He didn’t need to. The structure of incentives was such that people anticipated his preferences and acted accordingly. A governor who pleased Zhang got access to loans and protection. A governor who displeased him found his rivals suddenly better armed and his Japanese contacts suddenly unavailable.

The marriages were particularly elegant. Zhang’s daughters married into the Manchurian aristocracy. His sons-in-law received governorships. His grandchildren became hostages to cooperation, though no one would have used that word. If a governor considered defection, he had to weigh not just political consequences but social ones: Would his daughter be disowned? Would his grandchildren lose their inheritance? Would his in-laws turn against him?

Betrayal wasn’t just risky. It was embarrassing. And in a culture that prized face above almost everything, embarrassment was a powerful deterrent.

The system worked until it didn’t.

By 1928, the strains were showing. The Nationalists had unified most of southern China and were marching north. Zhang’s coalition had overextended, trying to hold Beijing against a superior force. The Japanese, who had financed much of his military expansion, were growing frustrated with his attempts to play them against other foreign powers.

Zhang was trying to do something difficult: maintain independence in a closing vise. The Japanese wanted Manchuria as a colony. The Nationalists wanted it as a province. Zhang wanted it as his own domain, beholden to neither.

The bomb at Huanggutun was the Japanese answer to this ambiguity. Komoto Daisaku and his fellow officers believed they could manufacture a crisis, blame it on the Chinese, and use Zhang’s death as a pretext for intervention. They were premature - Tokyo wasn’t ready for war in 1928 - but they were directionally correct. Three years later, the Kwantung Army would invade Manchuria, and this time Tokyo would accept the fait accompli.

Zhang Xueliang inherited the coalition. He was young, modernizing, and - crucially - furious at the Japanese for killing his father. He aligned with the Nationalists, flying the Nationalist flag over Manchuria in December 1928.

The coalition held for three more years, increasingly hollow. When the Japanese invaded in September 1931, it collapsed in weeks. Local governors defected or fled. Revenue streams dried up. The structure that had survived civil wars and foreign pressure evaporated the moment the external threat became overwhelming.

What’s the lesson?

It’s tempting to read Zhang Zuolin’s story as a parable about the fragility of informal power. The system worked until a bomb and an invasion destroyed it. Coordination-based coalitions are resilient until they aren’t.

But that framing misses something. The Fengtian clique lasted nearly two decades. It outlived the Qing dynasty, survived the warlord era’s constant warfare, and created something like stability in one of the most chaotic regions on earth. Zhang Zuolin, a bandit with no education and no legitimacy, died controlling more territory than most national governments.

The lesson isn’t that informal power is fragile. It’s that all power is fragile. Formal authority collapses too - ask the Qing, or the Republic of China, or the Soviet Union. The question isn’t whether your system can survive any shock. No system can. The question is whether your system is adapted to the shocks it actually faces.

Zhang’s system was adapted to civil war, to factional competition, to the complex dance of warlord politics. It was not adapted to a modern army backed by an industrial economy, willing to dispense with negotiation entirely.

But then, what would have been?

I think about Zhang Zuolin sometimes when I read about startups, or DAOs, or any organization that runs on coordination rather than command.

The pattern is the same. A central figure who doesn’t control resources directly but controls access. A network of semi-autonomous operators who stay aligned because the alternative is worse. Soft power, reputation, the careful cultivation of mutual dependence.

These structures are genuinely powerful. They can outcompete hierarchies in volatile environments. They can attract talent that would never submit to traditional employment. They can adapt faster, move lighter, route around obstacles.

They also die faster when the environment shifts. A hierarchy can survive bad leadership through sheer institutional momentum. A coordination-based coalition lives and dies with the coordinator’s ability to keep everyone at the table.

Zhang understood incentives better than almost anyone in his era. But he didn’t control them. The Japanese had their own incentives. The Nationalists had theirs. When those external incentives shifted, the internal logic of the Fengtian clique stopped mattering.

Power is what people willingly give you because the alternative is worse. The catch is that you don’t control the alternatives.

Zhang Zuolin figured this out, eventually. By then, his train was already passing under the bridge.