A century ago, in December 1922, a New York Times front page article confidently predicted that the next leader of China would be a military officer named Wu Peifu. The Times was wrong about this: General Wu turned out to be little more than a footnote in the great trends of modern Chinese history.

But who was he? And how did he get into a position where such a prediction might have seemed plausible in the 1920s?

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