The son of an ex-government official (華陽縣縣長) of the Qing Dynasty, Hu Kexian was sent away by his parents to study business in Chongqing when he was a teenager; However, Hu Kexian ran away en route to Chongqing and joined the Huangpu Army Academy in Nanjing. The young man had the ambition of helping Chiang Kai-shek to restore order to China during the period of chaos with warlords throughout the country. By the time Hu Kexian graduated the academy, the campaign against the warlords had already ended, but the invasion of the Japanese had just begun.