After Lu's defeat, most of his army dissolved into independent bands of soldiers, many of whom resorted to banditry in order to survive. Foreign missionaries and aid workers active in Guangxi at this time reported that banditry in Guangxi was extremely common and severe, with bandits commonly looting all food and valuables from undefended villages and resorting to murder and public cannibalism in order to extort ransoms from the relatives of people they kidnapped. Li, intending to become more than a bandit, began building a personal military force of professional soldiers that became the equal of any group of bandits or Zhuang irregulars that Lu Rongting drew on in his war to re-establish his power in Guangxi. Li joined Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang after Sun established a base in Guangdong.
