Twenty Days: Talks, Ultimatums and Escalation, 8–27 July 1937

For twenty days after the shots at Wanping, North China hung between a local quarrel and a national war. Officers on the spot signed cease-fires, broke them and signed again. In Tokyo the army argued with itself and the cabinet sent troops while saying it wanted peace. In Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek told his country it had reached the limit of endurance, and then told the Americans he would accept one last local settlement. This chapter follows the talks, the troop trains and the ultimatums from 8 to 27 July 1937, and asks why none of the settlements held.

Why it mattered

The shooting near the Marco Polo Bridge on the night of 7–8 July 1937 was not the first clash between Chinese and Japanese troops in North China. Since the Mukden Incident of 1931 and the Tanggu Truce of 1933, told in Chapter 1, local commanders had fought, negotiated and signed many times without a general war. What made July 1937 different was what happened in the twenty days that followed. By 28 July both governments had committed themselves, in public, to positions that left almost no room for another local deal.

Those twenty days are the hinge of the whole story. On the Japanese side, a cabinet that said it wanted to “localize” the incident decided on 11 July to send troops from Manchuria, Korea and Japan itself, and announced the decision to the press that evening. On the Chinese side, Chiang Kai-shek, who for six years had traded territory in the north for time, said on 17 July that the incident raised “problems involving the existence of the nation as a whole.” Each side read the other’s moves as proof of bad faith. Each kept talking while its soldiers moved into position.

The historian James B. Crowley, writing in 1963, found no evidence that the Japanese army had planned the clash at the bridge, and argued that the decisive steps toward war were taken afterward, above all in Tokyo (Crowley, 1963; Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy). Chinese historians, and Rana Mitter and Hans van de Ven among Western ones, stress instead how far Japanese pressure on North China had already gone by 1937, and why Chiang concluded that one more local concession would be the end of Chinese authority in the north (Mitter, Forgotten Ally; van de Ven, China at War). Both views meet in these three weeks.

8–10 July: cease-fires that did not hold

The fighting that began at dawn on 8 July, when Japanese troops of Col. Mutaguchi Renya’s 1st Infantry Regiment attacked the Chinese positions at Longwangmiao on the Yongding River, is told in Chapter 3. By the middle of that morning both sides were already looking for a way to stop. Chinese requests produced a temporary halt in the firing about 0930 on 8 July, according to the Japanese record summarized in Japanese reference works, and the talks that had begun in the night between Wanping’s magistrate, Wang Lengzhai, and the Japanese officers went on.

The men who negotiated were local. Song Zheyuan, commander of the 29th Army and chairman of the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, was not in Beiping at all; he had gone home to Leling county in Shandong in May and had stayed away. In his absence the senior Chinese figure in Beiping was Qin Dechun, the city’s mayor and the 29th Army’s acting commander. On the Japanese side, the China Garrison Army at Tianjin was led by Lt. Gen. Tashiro Kanichiro, who was seriously ill, with Maj. Gen. Hashimoto Gun as chief of staff. Its liaison with the Chinese in Beiping was Col. Matsui Takuro, head of the army’s Special Service Agency in the city (Japanese War History Office, Senshi Sosho, vol. 86, as cited in Japanese reference works).

About 0200 on 9 July the two sides agreed that Japanese troops would hold the east bank of the Yongding River and Chinese troops the west bank, around Wanping and the bridge. The Chinese withdrawal was due at 0500 but was delayed by poor coordination, and firing broke out again in the early morning; most of the Chinese troops had pulled back by about 1220. The Chinese account adds that the 37th Division, which held Wanping and was regarded by the Japanese as the most hostile unit in the 29th Army, would be replaced by troops of another division. Neither side trusted the other to keep the terms, and neither fully did.

On 10 July Hashimoto put the Japanese conditions in writing: an apology, punishment of those responsible, the withdrawal of Chinese troops from the Lugouqiao area and the suppression of anti-Japanese organizations. That evening the fighting flared again. Chinese troops advanced and retook Longwangmiao, and Japanese troops took it back about 2100. The American Embassy in Tokyo was told by the Japanese Foreign Office two days later that the Chinese attacks of the night of 10–11 July had surprised Japanese troops who were in the act of withdrawing from the river (Grew to Secretary of State, 12 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 119). The Chinese said the Japanese had attacked first. As on the night of 7 July, each side’s account of who fired first was the mirror of the other’s.

Behind the front, both armies were already moving. Early on 8 July the Kwantung Army’s headquarters in Manchuria met and concluded that the moment favored a blow against the Hebei–Chahar authorities. At 1810 that day it issued a public statement that it was “watching developments closely,” an unusual step for a command whose area did not include North China, and it began moving the 11th Independent Mixed Brigade and air units toward the Great Wall. When Tsuji Masanobu arrived in Tianjin from the Kwantung Army to press for joint action, the China Garrison Army’s staff sent him away (Japanese reference works, after Senshi Sosho). In Nanjing, the War Minister, He Yingqin, flew back on 10 July from Sichuan.

Tokyo: the army argues with itself

News of the clash reached Tokyo on the morning of 8 July. The Army General Staff’s first answer was to limit it. Its operations chief, Maj. Gen. Ishiwara Kanji, the officer who had planned the Mukden Incident in 1931, had come to believe that Japan must not be drawn into a war in China. His reasons were strategic. The Soviet Union, not China, was the danger he planned against; he wanted years of quiet to build up the heavy industry of Manchukuo; and he warned that a war in China would not end quickly but would become a swamp (Tobe Ryoichi, National Institute for Defense Studies, 2019; Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West). On 8 July the General Staff instructed the forces in China to avoid any further use of force.

Ishiwara’s own staff did not agree. Col. Muto Akira, chief of the Operations Section under him since March 1937, sided with Tanaka Shin’ichi of the War Ministry and with others who believed that China would give way after one hard blow. Japanese historians call this view the ichigeki (“one blow”) theory, and its supporters are usually called the expansionists (kakudai-ha), against the non-expansionists (fukakudai-ha) around Ishiwara (Tobe, 2019). The expansionists did not, in July, want a war across all of China. They wanted to settle the North China question by force, quickly, and believed the 29th Army could be pushed out of the Beiping–Tianjin region at small cost. The quarrel between the two officers became so bitter that Ishiwara told Muto, in effect, that one of them would have to go. Ishiwara later called Muto a subordinate who obeyed on the surface and defied him at heart.

The argument was weighted from the start. Ishiwara’s own record made him a weak advocate of obedience: he had led the Kwantung Army into Manchuria in 1931 against the wishes of Tokyo. A story repeated in Japanese accounts, which may belong to an earlier quarrel over Inner Mongolia in 1936, has a younger officer telling him that they were only doing what he had done in Manchuria. The army’s chain of command also gave the War Ministry, not the General Staff, the lead in political questions, and the War Ministry was readier to send troops. The non-expansionists could not prevent reinforcement; they could only try to limit it and delay it.

Both factions agreed that the China Garrison Army was dangerously small. It had about 5,600 men, scattered between Tianjin, Fengtai, Beiping and the railway posts, facing a 29th Army of about 75,000 in Hebei. About 15,000 Japanese civilians lived in the Beiping–Tianjin region, and the memory of past anti-foreign violence weighed on every staff paper (Tobe, 2019; Hattori and Drea, in The Battle for China). Reports that Nanjing was sending Central Army divisions north made the numbers look worse. Even Ishiwara accepted that some reinforcement was needed to protect the garrison.

11 July: a settlement in Beiping and a decision in Tokyo

Sunday 11 July 1937 was the most important day of the twenty. In Tokyo the War Minister, Gen. Sugiyama Hajime, proposed about 0850 that three divisions be sent from Japan. The Navy Minister, Adm. Yonai Mitsumasa, objected, and the proposal was put aside. At 1130 the five principal ministers, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, Sugiyama, Yonai, Foreign Minister Hirota Koki and Finance Minister Kaya Okinori, met and agreed on a policy that the Emperor approved the same day. Japan would make a show of force to obtain a Chinese apology and guarantees; it would attack only if it became clear that the Chinese would refuse; it would keep the incident local and leave the negotiating to the field commanders; and it would send an expeditionary force of five divisions, of which three were enough for the time being, abandoning the dispatch of newly mobilized troops if it proved unnecessary (Japanese Monograph No. 144, Appendix 5).

An extraordinary cabinet meeting approved the dispatch to North China at 1400, and at 1824 the government announced it. The statement blamed the 29th Army for firing near the bridge shortly before midnight on 7 July and for a fresh attack on 10 July; it cited Chinese troop movements and the refusal to negotiate in good faith as proof of hostile intent; it said the cabinet had decided “to take measures” to send troops to North China; and it still spoke of a peaceful settlement through local negotiation (Japanese Monograph No. 144, Appendix 5). The next day the Japanese Embassy in Washington gave the State Department a version which said that Chinese troops had attacked “for no cause at all,” that Japan had decided on precautionary steps “including the dispatch of additional military forces to North China,” and that “an amicable solution can yet be attained if China agrees to offer apologies” (Japanese Embassy statement, 12 July 1937, FRUS Japan 1931–1941, vol. I, doc. 234). From 11 July the government called the affair the North China Incident (Hokushi Jihen).

That evening, at 2100, Konoe invited the leaders of the political parties, business and the major newspapers to his official residence and asked for national unity behind the decision. The papers took a hard line in the days that followed. Historians have long debated why a prime minister who said he wanted the incident settled locally chose to make so public a show of strength. Crowley’s answer was that Konoe and his ministers believed firmness would bring a quick Chinese concession, and that the announcement was meant to impress Nanjing as much as to reassure the army (Crowley, 1963). Its effect in China was the opposite.

Meanwhile in Beiping the local talks reached an agreement. At 2000 on 11 July a document was handed to the Japanese side in the names of Zhang Zizhong, commander of the 38th Division and mayor of Tianjin, and Zhang Yunrong, a member of the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, as representatives of the 29th Army. Matsui Takuro received it for the Japanese, and Qin Dechun is usually named as the Chinese authority who approved it. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, later summarized its three points for the House of Commons: the 29th Army would not reoccupy Wanping; it apologized for the incident of 7–8 July and promised to punish those responsible; and it promised steps to control anti-Japanese activities (Hansard, House of Commons, 28 July 1937). Japanese summaries add that the Chinese troops would withdraw from Lugouqiao and Longwangmiao, and that the defense of Wanping would pass to the civilian Peace Preservation Corps.

The American Ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson, reported from Beiping that a Japanese Embassy official told him “responsible military officials” had signed at 2000. Between 2000 and 2030 the mayor’s office announced a peaceful settlement under which both sides would withdraw to their original lines and express regret for lives lost. About 2300 the announcement was withdrawn “because of difficulties,” and from 2200 firing could be heard in the city. A Japanese official said the shots came from Chinese troops north of the bridge who were not in contact with Japanese units and that the agreement stood; a Chinese official source said the Japanese had broken it and renewed their attack about 2215. The same Chinese source reported four troop trains on their way from Mukden to Fengtai, one already arrived with 77 cases of ammunition (Johnson to Secretary of State, 12 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 116).

So on the same day, within six hours, the men on the spot signed a local settlement and the government in Tokyo announced that it was sending an army. The two decisions pulled in opposite directions. To the Japanese cabinet, the reinforcements were insurance that the Chinese would carry out the agreement. To Nanjing, the reinforcements showed that the agreement was cover for an invasion, and that any local deal Song’s subordinates made would be followed by new demands. The cease-fire was never fully observed, and the troop trains kept coming.

Reinforcements: Manchuria, Korea and a new commander

Following the five ministers’ decision, the General Staff authorized the dispatch to North China of two independent mixed brigades of the Kwantung Army, an infantry division from the Korea Army and army air units. The Kwantung Army sent the 1st and 11th Independent Mixed Brigades, and the Korea Army sent the 20th Division under Lt. Gen. Kawagishi Bunzaburo, normally stationed at Seoul (Keijo). They moved by rail across Manchuria and through the Great Wall at Shanhaiguan to Tianjin, with the brigades going on to positions north and east of Beiping. A Temporary China Area Aviation Division under Tokugawa Yoshitoshi brought reconnaissance, fighter and bomber units to airfields around Tianjin. Accounts of the arrival dates differ by a day or two, but by about 20 July the reinforcements had reached the Beiping–Tianjin area, and the 20th Division was concentrated by 25 July (Hattori and Drea; Harmsen, War in the Far East, vol. 1).

The three divisions from Japan were another matter. Their dispatch was put on hold on 13 July, decided again on 20 July, put on hold a second time on 22 July because the situation seemed calmer, and finally decided on 27 July after new fighting (Tobe, 2019). That back-and-forth is the clearest record of the struggle in Tokyo: each time the local talks seemed to work, Ishiwara’s side won a delay; each time there was new shooting, the expansionists won the argument.

The China Garrison Army also changed hands. Tashiro, the commander who had cultivated working relations with Song Zheyuan, was too ill to command. On 11 July the army appointed Lt. Gen. Katsuki Kiyoshi, a 55-year-old former commander of the Imperial Guards Division, to replace him. Tashiro died in Tianjin on 16 July; some English-language accounts give 12 or 15 July (Japanese biographical records; Wikipedia, “Battle of Beiping–Tianjin”). Katsuki arrived knowing little of the local situation and with orders that reflected the uncertain mood in Tokyo: settle locally if possible, but be ready to act. By 15 July his staff had completed a plan for an offensive against the 29th Army, with troops to be in position by about 20 July (Warfare History Network, after the Japanese official history).

The small incidents went on. On 13 July a Japanese army truck was blown up at Dahongmen, just south of Beiping, by men of the 38th Division, killing four Japanese soldiers. On 14 July a party of Japanese cavalry was attacked and killed. Chinese troops fired on a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft on 18 July, and on 19 and 20 July shells fired from Wanping fell among Japanese troops, who fired back (Japanese reference works, after Iwatani Nobu and Senshi Sosho). Japanese accounts list these as Chinese provocations; Chinese accounts list the Japanese shelling of Wanping in the same days as Japanese ones. Each incident fed the argument in Tokyo.

Nanjing and Lushan: Chiang decides

Chiang Kai-shek heard of the clash at Lushan, the mountain resort in Jiangxi where his government spent the summer. His first moves were military. On 9 July he ordered Sun Lianzhong’s 26th Route Army, with two divisions, north to Baoding and Shijiazhuang on the Beiping–Hankou railway, to come under Song Zheyuan’s command, and other Central Army divisions followed (Hsu and Chang, History of the Sino-Japanese War; Hattori and Drea). By 12 July the Japanese government’s main worry, its Foreign Office told the American Embassy, was a report that Nanjing had ordered four divisions to mobilize and move north, a movement that had been confirmed, along with the northward flight of Chinese aircraft (Grew, 12 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 119). Under the He–Umezu agreement of 1935, Central Army troops were supposed to stay out of Hebei, and Japan treated their approach as a breach.

Chiang’s War Minister was blunter than his diplomats. On the evening of 11 July the American Counselor of Embassy, Willys Peck, asked He Yingqin whether the incident meant war. The decision rested with Japan, He replied; China was unwilling to fight but would do so at once if Japan chose war, and neither Wanping nor the bridge would be given up. He suggested that the Kwantung Army, and Itagaki Seishiro in particular, whom he still called its chief of staff (Itagaki had left that post in March to command a division), might have started the trouble without Tokyo’s approval (Peck to Secretary of State, 12 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 117).

On 17 July Chiang spoke to a conference of educators and public figures at Lushan. The address was published by the Central News Agency on 19 July, and the American Embassy cabled a translation to Washington the next day (Johnson, despatch of 26 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 273). It became known as the Lushan statement, or by the phrase at its heart, the “limit of endurance.” Chiang reminded his listeners of the loss of the Northeast and of the Tanggu Truce, and said that “the developments at Lukouchiao therefore raise problems involving the existence of the nation as a whole.” China, he said, was weak and wanted peace, but if it reached the limit of endurance it would have no choice but to fight to the end (The Collected Wartime Messages of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, vol. I, pp. 21–25).

He then set out four conditions for any settlement. It must not infringe China’s territorial integrity and sovereign rights. The status of the Hebei–Chahar Political Council must not be altered illegally. Local officials appointed by the central government, such as the council’s chairman, could not be removed or changed under outside pressure. And there could be no restrictions on the positions held by the 29th Army (Collected Wartime Messages, vol. I; Japanese Monograph No. 144, Appendix 6). These were minimum terms, but they ruled out the kind of local deal that had been made in 1933 and 1935, in which Chinese officials and troops were moved at Japanese demand.

In their words

Once the battle is joined there can be no distinction between north and south, nor between old and young.

The statement worked as a political act inside China. Ambassador Johnson reported that responses from every faction were largely enthusiastic. On 22 July the Guangxi leaders Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, who had revolted against Chiang the year before, publicly praised the address and pledged to support resistance “to the bitter end.” Johnson judged that the nation was more determined to resist than ever before, and that Chiang had left himself little room to retreat; if he failed to meet his own standard, rivals who already accused him of weakness toward Japan would use it against him (FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 273). The Communist Party had delivered its own manifesto for a united front to the Nationalists on 15 July, and on 23 July it rejected the Japanese conditions and called for full mobilization.

The Japanese read the address as a challenge. A counselor of the Japanese Embassy in Nanjing told the Americans on 20 July that the crisis had reached a point where explanations from Tokyo could no longer improve matters, and named Chiang’s address as one of the two developments that had brought it there (FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 273). Yet the Lushan statement did not close every door. It said explicitly that China would seek peace “until the very last moment,” and it left the local authorities free to negotiate within the four conditions. Chiang was still keeping two lines open.

Song Zheyuan’s local peace

Song Zheyuan came back to Tianjin from Shandong on 11 July. Nanjing wanted him at Baoding, the provincial capital on the railway south of Beiping, where he would be out of reach of Japanese pressure and close to the Central Army divisions coming north. He did not go. He stayed in Tianjin, the seat of the Japanese garrison, and tried to settle the incident there (Chinese biographical records). His reasons were the reasons of a regional commander. His power rested on the 29th Army and on his position in Hebei and Chahar; a war would destroy the first, and the arrival of Central Army troops would end the second. He also suspected that Chiang’s orders to hold firm were partly meant to let the Japanese wear down an army that was not Chiang’s own.

On 18 July Song called on Katsuki at the Japanese officers’ club in Tianjin, expressed regret for the incident and his hope for good relations (Iwatani, 2023, as cited in Wikipedia; Chinese biographical records). On 19 July his subordinates Zhang Zizhong and Zhang Yunrong signed a detailed agreement putting the 11 July terms into effect. Eden told the Commons that, according to Japanese sources, the Hebei–Chahar authorities stated that they would voluntarily remove persons who obstructed Sino-Japanese relations, control the Communist Party strictly and take a firmer line against anti-Japanese organizations and education. The 37th Division, whose troops had done most of the fighting, was to be moved out of Beiping (Hansard, 28 July 1937). Song himself refused to sign. The same day he returned to Beiping.

For a few days it looked as if the settlement might hold. The Japanese War Ministry suspended the home divisions a second time on 22 July. On 25 July Chiang received Ambassador Johnson and asked him to pass a message to Washington. Out of a sincere desire for peace, Chiang said, the Central Government had withdrawn its opposition to a local settlement between Song and the Japanese army on the basis of the three points of 11 July. That settlement was the absolute limit China could accept. He expected Japan to follow it with new demands, a settlement of all questions concerning Manchukuo, joint action against communism aimed at the Soviet Union, and the withdrawal of all Central Government troops from Hebei, and China would reject them. If the powers treated the local settlement as the end of the affair, he warned, they would learn too late that war was inevitable. He asked the United States and Britain to make clear to Tokyo, quickly, that China would fight rather than concede more (Johnson to Secretary of State, 25 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 264).

The withdrawal of the 37th Division was the test, and it went slowly. On 26 July a secretary of the Japanese Embassy told the Americans in Beiping that two of the division’s regiments were still inside the city and five more were at Xiyuan, the barracks west of the city, and nearby (Lockhart to Secretary of State, 26 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 267). Japanese officers saw the delay as bad faith. Chinese officers, watching the Japanese brigades take up positions around the city, saw no reason to leave Beiping undefended. By then the shooting had started again.

25–26 July: Langfang

Langfang is a railway town roughly halfway between Beiping and Tianjin. In July 1937 it was held by the 226th Regiment of Zhang Zizhong’s 38th Division. On the afternoon of 25 July a company of the Japanese 77th Infantry Regiment, part of the newly arrived 20th Division, came up by train with a signal team to repair the military telegraph line, which had failed where it ran through the Chinese barracks area. The Japanese account says the Chinese had been notified in advance; the company arrived about 1630 and, after talks with the Chinese unit, began work (Japanese War Ministry press bureau, Shuho, 4 August 1937, and Senshi Sosho, vol. 86, as cited in Japanese reference works).

The accounts then divide. The Japanese Embassy told the Americans that about 2300 a regiment of the 38th Division surrounded the company, that serious fighting began after midnight, and that it ended about 0600 after Japanese aircraft joined in. The semi-official Chinese Central News Agency said the Japanese company arrived about 2300 and demanded control of the station; the Chinese refused, and the Japanese opened fire. Japanese reinforcements arrived from Tianjin some hours later, and, in the agency’s words, “five Japanese bombing planes arrived and caused heavy destruction and casualties among the Chinese.” The Japanese occupied the station about 0700, and the fighting ended about 0900 (Lockhart to Secretary of State, 26 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 267). Japanese sources put the first Chinese fire, from rifles, light machine guns and mortars in a barracks about 300 meters north of the station, at about 2310.

At dawn on 26 July Japanese aircraft bombed the Chinese barracks, and the rest of the 77th Infantry Regiment arrived from Tianjin between about 0630 and 0730. The Chinese troops withdrew from the Langfang area by about 1000. The Japanese War Ministry reported its losses as one NCO and three men killed and one NCO and nine men wounded. No reliable count of the Chinese dead exists; the Central News Agency spoke only of heavy casualties from the bombing (Japanese War Ministry, 1937; FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 267). With Langfang in Japanese hands, the railway between Beiping and Tianjin was cut for the Chinese.

Langfang ended the local settlement. The Japanese garrison headquarters at Tianjin abandoned talks in favor of military action, and on 26 July the Army General Staff in Tokyo authorized the China Garrison Army to use force (Japanese reference works, after Hioki, 2005). Whether the Chinese regiment fired on a repair party it had been told to expect, or the Japanese company used the repair as cover to seize the station, the sources do not settle. What is clear is that Tokyo’s restraint had depended on the local settlement holding, and after Langfang it did not.

26 July: the ultimatum and the Guang’anmen gate

On 26 July Japanese officers handed the mayor of Beiping and other Chinese officials two demands. The troops of the 37th Division near Babaoshan, west of the city, and at the Marco Polo Bridge were to withdraw west of the Yongding River by noon on 27 July. The division’s troops inside Beiping and at Xiyuan were to withdraw by noon on 28 July. A secretary of the Japanese Embassy gave the Americans a slightly different version, in which the troops in the city would withdraw to Changxindian, the railway town southwest of the bridge. The Japanese military advised the embassies to warn their nationals in the Western Hills to leave. The mayor was reported to have said that the division did not intend to withdraw (Lockhart to Secretary of State, 26 July 1937, FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 272). Japanese records give the same deadlines (Japanese War Ministry, 1937; Senshi Sosho, vol. 86). Some later accounts compress the demand into a single 24-hour deadline.

That evening the Japanese garrison tried to move a battalion into the city. The 2nd Battalion of the 2nd China Garrison Infantry Regiment, under Maj. Hirobe, came up from Fengtai in 26 trucks, bound for the Japanese barracks in the Legation Quarter, ostensibly to protect Japanese residents. Matsui had arranged with the Chinese authorities for the column to pass through the Guang’anmen gate in the west wall, and Mayor Qin had approved, but the Chinese guards kept the gate shut when Maj. Sakurai Tokutaro, a Japanese adviser to the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, arrived about 1800 to make contact. After further talks the gate was opened about 1930 and the trucks began to pass. When part of the column was through, the Chinese troops on the wall opened fire, and the gate was closed, splitting the battalion inside and outside the wall (Senshi Sosho, vol. 86, pp. 216–217, and Iko Toshiya, 2007, as cited in Wikipedia, “Guanganmen incident”).

The fighting at the gate lasted more than an hour. Lockhart reported to Washington that night that fighting had broken out about 1900 at the gate, which he called Changyimen, another name for Guang’anmen, after Japanese troops, 400 to 500 men by one Japanese source, tried to enter and were refused; negotiations over their entry were under way (FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 272). A relief column sent by Maj. Gen. Kawabe Masakazu from Fengtai arrived about 2130, and the two sides agreed that the Chinese troops would keep their distance, the Japanese inside the wall would go on to the Legation Quarter and those outside would return to Fengtai. The firing stopped soon after 2200, and Hirobe’s men reached the legation barracks about 0200 on 27 July. Japanese records count two soldiers killed and about 17 wounded, among them a correspondent; Sakurai’s interpreter was also killed. Chinese losses are not recorded.

To the Japanese command, the Guang’anmen affair was an ambush of troops whose passage had been agreed. To the Chinese garrison, it was an attempt to put a Japanese battalion inside the walls of the old capital on the eve of an ultimatum. Either way it finished what Langfang had begun. The China Garrison Army withdrew its demand for a phased withdrawal and, at about 0200 on 28 July, notified Song that Japan would no longer tolerate Chinese provocations, citing the events at the gate, and would act as it saw fit. It advised him to withdraw all forces from Beiping to spare the city from battle (Japanese War Ministry, 1937, as cited in Japanese reference works).

27 July: the last day of peace in the north

On 27 July the Japanese cabinet approved, for the third time, the dispatch of divisions from Japan, and this time the order stood. The Army General Staff issued the China Garrison Army a new mission (Army General Staff order No. 64), and the divisions that later formed the core of the North China campaign began to mobilize (Tobe, 2019). Ishiwara had lost. The non-expansionists had hoped to keep the fighting inside the Beiping–Tianjin region, and in July so did most of the expansionists. Within weeks the war would spread to Shanghai, told in Chapter 6.

In the field, the Japanese finished their preparations for an attack south of Beiping, aimed at the 29th Army’s main barracks at Nanyuan, while the Kwantung Army brigades held the Chinese forces north of the city. Early on 27 July units of the Japanese garrison surrounded a battalion of the Chinese 39th Independent Brigade at Tongzhou, east of Beiping; part of it broke out toward Nanyuan. Japanese aircraft attacked Chinese positions near Beiping and flew reconnaissance as far south as Kaifeng, Zhengzhou and Luoyang, looking for the Central Army divisions on the railways (Hattori and Drea; Warfare History Network). Song rejected the ultimatum, ordered his troops to prepare for battle and asked Nanjing for reinforcements. None arrived in time.

In London the next afternoon, Eden told the Commons that Britain’s chargé d’affaires in Tokyo had been instructed to express the hope that fighting in Beiping would be avoided, and that British subjects in the city had been advised to move into the Legation Quarter as a precaution (Hansard, 28 July 1937). By then the Japanese attack had begun. The story of 28 July, of Nanyuan, Tong Linge and Zhao Dengyu, and of the fall of Beiping and Tianjin, is told in Chapter 5.

By the numbers

Twenty days from Wanping to the general attack

Days after the first shots near Wanping (night of 7–8 July 1937)

Cease-fire line (9 Jul)1

Troops sent; local deal (11 Jul)3

Tashiro dies (16 Jul)8

Lushan statement (17 Jul)9

Detailed terms (19 Jul)11

Divisions held again (22 Jul)14

Chiang accepts deal (25 Jul)17

Ultimatum (26 Jul)18

Divisions ordered (27 Jul)19

General attack (28 Jul)20

Timeline

Twenty days, 8–27 July 1937

1. 8 JulFighting at Longwangmiao at dawn; temporary halt about 0930. The Army General Staff orders restraint; the Kwantung Army issues a statement at 1810 and readies troops.
2. 9 JulAbout 0200, a cease-fire line on the Yongding River is agreed. Chiang orders Sun Lianzhong’s 26th Route Army north to Baoding and Shijiazhuang.
3. 10 JulHashimoto Gun presents Japanese demands; Longwangmiao changes hands again in the evening.
4. 11 JulFive ministers’ conference (1130) and cabinet (1400) decide to send troops; announcement at 1824; Konoe meets press and party leaders at 2100. Local agreement at 2000 in Beiping. Katsuki Kiyoshi appointed to command the China Garrison Army. Song Zheyuan arrives in Tianjin.
5. 13 JulJapanese truck blown up at Dahongmen, four soldiers killed. Dispatch of home divisions put on hold.
6. 15 JulCommunist Party delivers its united-front manifesto to the Nationalists. Katsuki’s staff completes an offensive plan.
7. 16 JulTashiro Kanichiro dies in Tianjin.
8. 17 JulChiang’s Lushan statement, with four minimum conditions; published 19 July.
9. 18 JulSong Zheyuan calls on Katsuki in Tianjin.
10. 19 JulDetailed terms signed by Zhang Zizhong and Zhang Yunrong; Song returns to Beiping.
11. 20 JulHome divisions approved again; firing at Wanping.
12. 22 JulHome divisions put on hold a second time. Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi back Chiang.
13. 25 JulChiang tells Ambassador Johnson he accepts a local settlement as the absolute limit. About 2310, fighting begins at Langfang.
14. 26 JulJapanese bomb Langfang and take the station. General Staff authorizes force. Ultimatum on the 37th Division. Guang’anmen clash about 1930–2200.
15. 27 JulCabinet orders the home divisions; Japanese surround Chinese troops at Tongzhou; Song rejects the ultimatum.

People

Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), a prince of one of Japan’s oldest noble houses, became prime minister on 4 June 1937. His cabinet’s decision and public statement of 11 July turned a local incident into a national commitment. He later declared, in January 1938, that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang’s government. He took his own life in December 1945 rather than face arrest as a war crimes suspect.

Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949), architect of the Mukden Incident in 1931, was chief of the General Staff’s Operations Division in July 1937 and the leading voice against expanding the war. He lost the argument and was moved to the Kwantung Army as deputy chief of staff in the reorganization of September 1937. He was not prosecuted after the war.

Muto Akira (1892–1948), chief of the Operations Section under Ishiwara, argued for a decisive blow against the 29th Army. He went to Shanghai in the autumn as a staff officer of the Central China Area Army, later headed the War Ministry’s Military Affairs Bureau, and was hanged in December 1948 after the Tokyo tribunal convicted him of war crimes.

Katsuki Kiyoshi (1881–1950), a former commander of the Imperial Guards Division, took over the China Garrison Army on 11 July. He negotiated with Song through mid-July and then commanded the attack of 28 July. In late August he took command of the new 1st Army in North China, and he was placed on the reserve list in 1938. Tashiro Kanichiro, his predecessor, who had dealt with Song for more than a year, died in Tianjin on 16 July.

Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), chairman of the Military Affairs Commission and the dominant figure in the Nationalist government, moved from appeasement to resistance in these weeks. His Lushan statement of 17 July set the conditions he would not go below; his message of 25 July to the Americans shows how far he was still willing to go to avoid war in the north.

Song Zheyuan (1885–1940), commander of the 29th Army and chairman of the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, tried to the end to settle the incident locally. He led his army out of Beiping on the night of 28–29 July, commanded in the early campaigns in Hebei and Shandong, and died of illness in Sichuan in April 1940.

Zhang Zizhong (1891–1940), commander of the 38th Division and mayor of Tianjin, signed the local documents for the 29th Army and stayed in Beiping after the army left. Denounced as a traitor that summer, he redeemed his name in battle and was killed in action near Yicheng, Hubei, in May 1940; he is often described as the most senior Chinese general to die in combat in the war. Qin Dechun, mayor of Beiping and acting commander of the 29th Army, conducted the first talks. Matsui Takuro of the Special Service Agency in Beiping and Hashimoto Gun, chief of staff of the China Garrison Army, were their main Japanese counterparts.

Losses and uncertainty

The twenty days between 8 and 27 July were not a battle, and no source gives a total for the dead. The Japanese figures that exist come from the War Ministry’s press bureau and the postwar official history, Senshi Sosho, and they count incident by incident: four soldiers killed at Dahongmen on 13 July; one NCO and three men killed and ten wounded at Langfang on 25–26 July; two killed and about 17 wounded at the Guang’anmen gate on 26 July, plus an interpreter killed (the Wikipedia summary of the official history gives 17 wounded but itemizes only 16). Chinese losses for these weeks were never counted in a form that has survived. The Chinese Central News Agency reported “heavy destruction and casualties” from the bombing at Langfang, and Japanese reference works give Chinese losses on 8 July of more than 20 dead and 60 wounded, without a source. The heavy Chinese losses came on 28 July and after.

Strength figures vary more. For the 29th Army, Japanese studies and Hattori and Drea give about 75,000 men; other accounts give 78,000 or more than 100,000, depending on whether they count the independent brigades, the Peace Preservation Corps and units in Chahar. For the Japanese, the China Garrison Army’s strength of about 5,600 is consistent across sources. Totals for the reinforced Japanese force vary wildly: one popular history gives about 80,000 near Beiping and Tianjin after reinforcement; the German Wikipedia, after Hattori and Drea, gives about 210,000 for all Japanese forces in North China including the Kwantung Army after the home divisions arrived; the English Wikipedia’s claim that Japanese strength in the Beiping–Tianjin area exceeded 180,000 by 20 July cannot be right, since the home divisions had not yet been ordered. The difference is in what is counted and when.

Several facts in the brief history of these days are reported differently. Tashiro’s death is dated 16 July in Japanese records and 12 or 15 July in some English-language accounts. The 11 July agreement is variously called the Qin–Matsui agreement, from the men who negotiated it, or attributed to Zhang Zizhong and Zhang Yunrong, in whose names it was given; Hashimoto Gun, sometimes named, set the Japanese conditions the day before. Some accounts merge the 11 July and 19 July documents. The ultimatum of 26 July appears in American and Japanese records with two deadlines, noon on 27 July and noon on 28 July, while some later histories describe a single 24-hour deadline, and the Japanese note to Song early on 28 July is sometimes described as a second ultimatum. Even the gate has two names: the Americans called it Changyimen, its older name, and some English accounts confuse it with Guanghuamen. Where sources conflict, this chapter gives both versions.

The deeper uncertainty is about intent. Japanese wartime and some postwar writers presented Langfang and Guang’anmen as Chinese ambushes; Chinese accounts present them as Japanese provocations meant to justify an attack that had already been planned. The record shows that Katsuki’s staff completed an offensive plan by about 15 July while talks continued, and that Song’s subordinates signed terms on 19 July that Song himself would not sign. Both sides were preparing to fight while negotiating, and each side’s preparations convinced the other that the negotiations were not sincere.

Questions readers ask

Why didn’t the 11 July cease-fire hold?

Because the same day the Japanese government announced that it was sending troops to North China, and the Chinese government ordered its own divisions north. Each side treated the other’s reinforcements as proof that the local agreement was a cover. Small clashes continued, the 37th Division was slow to leave Beiping, and the agreement’s vague promises, such as controlling anti-Japanese activity, gave the Japanese grounds to say it was not being carried out. After Langfang on 25 July, the Japanese garrison gave up on it.

Did Japan’s government want war in July 1937?

Not a general war with China, at least not at first. The cabinet’s own policy of 11 July spoke of keeping the incident local and settling it through the field commanders. But the cabinet also chose to send troops and to announce it loudly, and an influential group in the army believed that one sharp blow would make China give way. Historians such as Crowley have argued that Tokyo’s choices after the incident, more than the incident itself, made war likely. The repeated stopping and starting of the home divisions between 13 and 27 July shows a government divided against itself.

What did Chiang Kai-shek say at Lushan?

On 17 July he told a conference at Lushan that the incident raised problems involving the existence of the nation, that China wanted peace until the last moment but would fight if it reached “the limit of endurance,” and that once fighting began there could be no distinction between north and south or old and young. He set four minimum conditions for a settlement, including that the Hebei–Chahar Political Council and the 29th Army’s positions not be changed under pressure. The address was published on 19 July.

What was the Japanese ultimatum of 26 July?

It demanded that the Chinese 37th Division withdraw from the Marco Polo Bridge and Babaoshan to the west bank of the Yongding River by noon on 27 July, and from Beiping and Xiyuan by noon on 28 July. After the Guang’anmen clash that evening, the Japanese garrison told Song early on 28 July that it would act freely, and advised him to take all his troops out of Beiping. The general Japanese attack began that morning.

Why did Song Zheyuan keep negotiating?

His position depended on keeping both his army and his semi-independent government in Hebei and Chahar. War would destroy the army, and the arrival of Chiang’s Central Army divisions would end his independence. He had settled with the Japanese before, and he hoped to do so again. He went to Tianjin rather than Baoding, called on Katsuki, let his subordinates sign the 19 July terms, and went back to Beiping on 19 July. He prepared to fight only after Langfang and the ultimatum.

Why were Japanese troops at Langfang and Fengtai at all?

The Boxer Protocol of 1901 allowed the foreign powers to keep troops at points along the railway between Beiping and the sea, and Langfang was one of the twelve places it named. Japan used the protocol, and agreements of the 1930s, to station its China Garrison Army along the line, and in 1936 it enlarged the garrison and posted troops at Fengtai, the railway junction southwest of Beiping. Chinese governments regarded the Fengtai garrison as going beyond the protocol (see Chapter 2).

How it connects

The positions both sides defended in July 1937 were built in the years told in Chapter 1: From Mukden to the Bridge: the Tanggu Truce, the He–Umezu and Qin–Doihara agreements of 1935, and the creation of the Hebei–Chahar Political Council that gave Song Zheyuan his uneasy authority. The garrisons and the ground are described in Chapter 2: The Bridge, the Town and the Garrisons, and the shots that began it all in Chapter 3: The Night of 7 July 1937.

The attack that the ultimatum announced, on Nanyuan, Beiping and Tianjin, and the Tongzhou mutiny of 29 July, are the subject of the next chapter, Chapter 5: The Fall of Beiping and Tianjin. Chiang’s Lushan commitment led, in August, to his decision to fight at Shanghai (Chapter 6). The American diplomats whose telegrams record so much of this chapter, Johnson, Peck, Lockhart and Grew, and the Roosevelt administration they reported to, return in Chapter 8: America and the World. Chiang’s request of 25 July that the United States and Britain warn Japan went largely unanswered, a pattern that lasted until the road to Pearl Harbor.

What happened afterward

On 28 July the Japanese attacked. Nanyuan fell that day, the 29th Army’s deputy commander Tong Linge and the 132nd Division’s commander Zhao Dengyu were killed, and Song led his army out of Beiping that night, leaving Zhang Zizhong behind to deal with the Japanese. Tianjin was bombed and taken on 29–30 July, and Japanese troops marched into Beiping on 8 August (Chapter 5). The divisions ordered from Japan on 27 July landed at Tanggu and pushed south along the railways that had carried the reinforcements in July.

The men of the twenty days went different ways. Ishiwara was moved to Manchuria in September; Muto went to the Shanghai front and rose to the top of the War Ministry. Katsuki commanded the 1st Army down the Beiping–Hankou railway before being retired in 1938. Konoe, whose government had promised to localize the incident, presided over its growth into a war across China; his statement of January 1938 that Japan would not deal with Chiang’s government closed the door to a negotiated end. Chiang, who had told the Americans on 25 July that the local settlement was his absolute limit, fought the war for eight years.

The arguments of July 1937 also returned after the war. The prosecution at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East presented the incident and its aftermath as part of a Japanese conspiracy to dominate China. Muto was among those convicted and hanged. Ishiwara, who had opposed the expansion, was questioned but not charged. Historians since Crowley have mostly concluded that there was no single plan behind the twenty days, but a series of decisions in Tokyo, Nanjing and the field, each of which made the next one harder to reverse.

Walking the ground today

The Beiping–Tianjin corridor of 1937 is now one of the most built-up regions in China. Langfang, the railway town of 25 July, is a prefecture-level city in Hebei with several million people, and the old line between Beijing and Tianjin is paralleled by one of China’s first high-speed railways, which covers in about half an hour a distance the troop trains of 1937 took hours to cover. Fengtai, the Japanese base, is a district of Beijing, still a major railway junction. The Guang’anmen gate in Beiping’s west wall, where Hirobe’s battalion was split, was demolished in the 1950s along with most of the city walls; the name survives in the streets and the district around the site.

The best place to start is at the bridge itself. The walled town of Wanping, the scene of the talks of 8–11 July, has been restored, and inside its walls stands the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japanese Aggression, opened in 1987, the national museum of the war. Its exhibits cover the July talks, the Lushan statement and the fighting that followed. The marble Lugou Bridge, with its carved stone lions, is closed to vehicles and open to walkers, and the railway bridge whose control mattered so much in 1937 still carries trains just downstream. A sculpture park and memorial grounds lie nearby, and the tomb of Zhao Dengyu, killed on 28 July, is close to the town (Chapter 9).

Far to the south, Lushan in Jiangxi, where Chiang made his statement, is a mountain resort and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The villa at Guling (Kuling) where Chiang and Song Meiling spent their summers, known as Meilu, is open to visitors, as are other buildings of the Nationalist summer capital. In Tokyo, Konoe’s villa Tekigaiso in Suginami, where many of his later decisions were made, has been preserved as a historic site. Check opening times and access before you go; sites in China may require identity documents or advance reservations.

Sources and further reading

• U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1937, vol. III, The Far East: Johnson to Secretary of State, 12 July 1937 (doc. 116); Peck to Secretary of State, 12 July 1937 (doc. 117); Grew to Secretary of State, 12 July 1937 (doc. 119); Johnson to Secretary of State, 25 July 1937 (doc. 264); Lockhart to Secretary of State, 26 July 1937 (doc. 267 and doc. 272); Johnson, despatch of 26 July 1937 on the Lushan address (doc. 273).
• Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Japan, 1931–1941, vol. I, Japanese Embassy statement of 12 July 1937 (doc. 234).
• U.S. Army, Japanese Monograph No. 144, Political Strategy Prior to Outbreak of War: Appendix 5 (policy and government announcement of 11 July 1937) and Appendix 6 (gist of Chiang Kai-shek’s statement at Lushan, 17 July 1937).
• Chinese Ministry of Information, The Collected Wartime Messages of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, 1937–1945, vol. I (John Day, 1946), pp. 21–25, “The Limit of China’s Endurance,” reprinted at Teaching the History of War: Sino-Japanese War, 1937.
• Hansard, House of Commons, “China and Japan,” 28 July 1937 (Anthony Eden on the 11 and 19 July documents).
• Tobe Ryoichi, “Nitchu senso no kakudai to Nihon rikugun, 1937-nen 7-gatsu – 1938-nen 10-gatsu” (The expansion of the Sino-Japanese War and the Japanese army), National Institute for Defense Studies, Tokyo, 2019.
• Boxer Protocol (Peking, 7 September 1901), Article IX, text at the UCLA Asia Institute.
• Japanese War History Office (Boeicho Boei Kenshujo Senshishitsu), Senshi Sosho, vol. 86, Shina Jihen Rikugun Sakusen (1) (Asagumo Shimbunsha, 1975), and the War Ministry press bureau’s report in Shuho, 4 August 1937, as cited in the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles on the Langfang Incident, the Guang’anmen incident and the Lugouqiao Incident; Japanese biographical entries for Tashiro Kanichiro, Katsuki Kiyoshi, Ishiwara Kanji and Muto Akira.
• James B. Crowley, “A Reconsideration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1963), and Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton University Press, 1966).
• Hattori Satoshi with Edward J. Drea, “Japanese Operations from July to December 1937,” in Mark Peattie, Edward Drea and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2011).
• Books: Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; UK title China’s War with Japan); Hans van de Ven, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China (Harvard University Press, 2018); Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009); Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (Harvard, 1991); Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton, 1975); Marjorie Dryburgh, North China and Japanese Expansion, 1933–1937 (Curzon, 2000); Hsu Long-hsuen and Chang Ming-kai, History of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) (Chung Wu, 1971); Peter Harmsen, War in the Far East, vol. 1, Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931–1941 (Casemate, 2018).
• Other: Warfare History Network, “The Fall of Beijing, 1937”; Wikipedia, “Battle of Beiping–Tianjin” and German Wikipedia, “Schlacht um Peking-Tianjin” (used for strength figures and their variants only).

Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, public domain (PD-Japan-oldphoto, PD-China, PD-ROC), as credited in each caption.