( 19March 1875 - 4 June 1928), was an influential Chinese bandit, soldier, and warlord during the Warlord Era in China. The warlord of Manchuria from 1916 to 1928, and the military dictator of the RoC in 1927 and 1928, he rose from banditry to power and influence.

By the late 1920s, there was no real doubt as to who controlled Manchuria. In 1928, the local warlord Zhang Zuolin was assassinated by troops of the Japanese Kwantung Army, a group of the Imperial Japanese Army that had been ordered to protect Japanese interests in the area. Zuolin had been killed because he attempted to isolate and deprive Japanese concessions in Manchuria of the resources they needed to function. His son, Zhang Xueliang, eventually commanded a private army of 200,000 men, with which he, for a time, supported Chiang Kai-shek when the Japanese invaded China itself. .