Background
From the perspective of modern political history, Liu Bei's tenure in Xuzhou in the first year of Jian'an (196) was in its nature a temporary "acting administrator" arrangement: Tao Qian's three acts of yielding Xuzhou left Liu Bei in control of the province for barely six months; local strongmen gave him no real loyalty, and externally he was hemmed in by the three powers of Cao Cao, Yuan Shu, and Lv Bu. When Lv Bu arrived seeking refuge after being driven out of Yanzhou by Cao Cao, Liu Bei took him in out of the reasoning "had Lv Bu not raided Yanzhou in the first place, how would this commandery have been saved from disaster" — yet his core staff Mi Zhu and Zhang Fei both objected explicitly, calling Lv Bu "a tiger-wolf; he must not be harbored". This internally inconsistent act of accommodation effectively installed Lv Bu — a time bomb — a mere forty or fifty li from the Xuzhou capital. When Yuan Shu invited Liu Bei to campaign against Guangling, the defense of Xuzhou was entrusted to a fundamentally unreliable proxy — Zhang Fei, notorious for his drinking — and the instability of the entire situation was structurally predetermined.
Key Figures
Lv Bu's role in this raid was not that of an impulsive warrior but of an opportunist commander goaded into action by Chen Gong. When Cao Bao's secret report arrived, it was precisely Chen Gong who pointed out: "Xiaopei is no place for a long stay. Xuzhou now presents an exploitable gap — if we do not seize it, we will regret it too late" — a remark that laid bare the deepest political anxiety of the Lvbujituan: dependent on another's hospitality, with no territory of its own. Cao Bao was the internal agent at the heart of the coup; his motivation sprang directly from the personal grudge of having been flogged fifty times by Zhang Fei, and he leveraged his kinship tie — "Lv Bu is my son-in-law" — to link the inside and outside. Zhang Fei was the nominal defender of the city, yet at the banquet he got drunk and flogged Cao Bao, personally handing the inside man to Lv Bu. Liu Bei was the structural victim: he was far away in Huainan confronting Yuan Shu, and had neither an early-warning mechanism nor any contingency plan for the loss of control inside the city.
Core Issues
The core issue of this event is "how to handle a guest general who is stronger than yourself and has nowhere else to go, while resting on a base of ground you cannot reliably entrust to anyone" — a dilemma repeatedly confronted by the contending lords of the late Han. Liu Bei's solution ended in total failure. When Liu Bei entered the city to accept the transfer of rulership, Lv Bu "was about to receive him, but seeing that Guan Yu and Zhang Fei standing behind Liu Bei each wore an expression of anger" — the two sides had in fact distrusted each other from the very beginning, and the yielding of Xuzhou was theater on both sides. Chen Gong's contribution in this episode reveals his true value as a strategist: his reading of people — Cao Bao's grievance, Zhang Fei's habitual drunkenness, the looseness of Xuzhou's city defenses — was far more precise than his reading of grand strategic trends. The success of that night's strike came not from Lv Bu's military genius but from Chen Gong's surgical exploitation of interpersonal fractures.
Political Consequences
The most immediate consequence was the change of hands of Xuzhou — but the deeper consequence was that the Liubeijituan entered a period of dependence lasting some three years. After entering the city, Lv Bu "ordered a hundred soldiers to guard Liu Bei's residence and forbade anyone to enter at will", preserving the possibility of a future reconciliation with Liu Bei while establishing the fact of their reversed principal-guest positions. Lv Bu subsequently returned Liu Bei's wives, Lady Gan and Lady Mi, to him — an act that appeared magnanimous but was in substance a political gesture by Lv Bu seeking allies between Cao Cao and Yuan Shu. Liu Bei, though permitted to camp at Xiaopei and bide his time, had completely lost strategic initiative, until Cao Cao's eastern campaign allowed him to use Cao Cao's hand to eliminate Lv Bu at the siege of Xiapi. Viewed across the longer arc of history, this loss of Xuzhou also caused Liu Bei to completely abandon any hope of independently building a base in the Shandong direction, propelling him onto the western developmental path of Jingzhou and Yizhou.
Counterfactual Analysis
If Zhang Fei had not flogged Cao Bao that night, would Lv Bu have struck anyway? Chen Gong's attitude suggests that the Lvbujituan had in fact been waiting for an opportunity all along — Cao Bao was merely the trigger, not the root cause. Even without this inside man, Lv Bu's strategic intention of using Xiaopei as a forward base and biding his time to absorb Xuzhou had already been set. More fruitful to explore: had Liu Bei from the outset heeded the counsel of Mi Zhu and Zhang Fei and refused to harbor Lv Bu, Lv Bu would have had no choice but to defect to Yuan Shu or Zhang Yang, and the pressure Cao Cao faced in consolidating Yanzhou would have been significantly reduced — history might well have moved toward an earlier establishment of Cao Cao's hegemony and a weaker Liu Bei ascendancy. Seen from this angle, the true cost of the decision to harbor Lv Bu extended far beyond the loss of a single city.