warlord

In China, any of the provincial leaders who took advantage of central government weakness, after the death of the first president of republican China in 1912, to organize their own private armies and fiefdoms. They engaged in civil wars until the nationalist leader Jiang Jie Shi's (Chiang Kai-shek's) Northern Expedition against them in 1926, and they exerted power until the communists seized control under Mao Zedong in 1949.