Feng Yuxiang was born in 1882 in Zhili Province, the son of an officer in the Huai Army. He enlisted at eleven as a deputy soldier -- the lowest rank, earning food and a uniform but no salary. While his peers gambled away their earnings, Feng saved his and shared it with soldiers who had even less. By sixteen he was a regular, and by 1902 he had transferred to Yuan Shikai's Beiyang Army, the most powerful military force in China. When the Xinhai Revolution erupted in 1911, Feng joined the Luanzhou Uprising against the Qing dynasty. The uprising failed and he was imprisoned, but Feng's talent for survival was already evident. Within three years he had regained his rank and was serving Yuan Shikai's new government. It was during this period that he converted to Methodism, baptized with the help of Chinese diplomat Wang Zhengting.

After Yuan Shikai's death in 1916, China splintered into competing warlord domains. Feng carved out his own territory in the northwest, governing with a peculiar blend of Christian socialism and iron discipline. He banned opium, morphine, gambling, and prostitution in his domains -- measures that earned him admiration from Western missionaries and suspicion from fellow warlords. His political moves were equally bold. In 1924, during the Second Zhili-Fengtian War, Feng launched a surprise coup in Beijing that toppled the ruling Zhili clique and reorganized his forces as the Guominjun. He invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing for reunification talks, though the talks came to nothing. By 1926, defeated by a coalition of his enemies, Feng retreated to the northwest before joining Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition. The alliance was never comfortable, and by 1929 Feng had turned against Chiang, joining the Central Plains War -- only to be defeated again.

Stripped of military command, Feng channeled his energy into the cause that had driven him since boyhood. As a young soldier, he had witnessed Japanese atrocities during the 1895 Sino-Japanese War and had sworn that if he ever gained power, he would fight them to the death. Every year from 1915 onward, he and his officers wore belts inscribed with the words "In Memory of the National Humiliation of May 7th," marking Japan's infamous Twenty-One Demands. In May 1933, Feng took command of the Chahar People's Anti-Japanese Army Alliance. With over 100,000 men and frontline commanders Ji Hongchang and Fang Zhenwu, his forces drove the Japanese and Manchukuoan troops out of Chahar Province. But Chiang Kai-shek, fearing Communist infiltration of the alliance, besieged the army with 60,000 men. Trapped between Chiang and the Japanese, Feng resigned and retired to Tai'an in Shandong.

Feng's final years traced a restless arc. He held nominal positions in the Nationalist government through the 1930s and early 1940s, called for Chiang's release during the Xi'an Incident, and briefly commanded Chinese forces at the defense of Shanghai in 1937. After the war, he traveled to the United States, becoming an outspoken critic of both Chiang's regime and the Truman administration that supported it. He spent months as a visiting scholar at Berkeley. In 1948, en route to the Soviet Union by ship, Feng Yuxiang died in a fire aboard his vessel on the Black Sea, along with one of his daughters. Whether it was an accident or assassination has never been settled. Richard Evans called him "an honest man." Peter Moody countered that many of Feng's allies might dispute this, "since he betrayed every one of them." Both assessments contain truth. His tomb near Tai'an draws visitors who see in Feng something rare among the warlords of his era: a man who, whatever his contradictions, never stopped fighting.