From Mukden to the Bridge: Manchuria, North China and the Road to 1937

The war that began at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937 had been coming for six years, and its roots went back three decades before that, to a railway Japan won from Russia in 1905. This chapter follows the road from Mukden to Beiping: the railway and the army that guarded it, the murder of a warlord, a staged explosion on a September night in 1931, a puppet empire, a truce signed at the Great Wall, and the slow squeeze on North China that left Japanese and Chinese troops camped within sight of each other outside the old capital by the summer of 1937.

Why it mattered

On the night of 7 July 1937, when shots were heard near a stone bridge southwest of Beiping (Peking), a Japanese infantry company was holding a night exercise in a place where, by most standards of international law, it had no business being. Japanese troops were there because of a chain of treaties, truces, ultimatums and local deals that reached back to the Boxer Protocol of 1901 and, above all, to Japan’s conquest of Manchuria in 1931. Every link in that chain had been forged by force or by the threat of it, and almost every link had been forged by Japanese officers in the field who were acting ahead of, and sometimes against, the wishes of their own government in Tokyo.

For the Chinese, the six years from the Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931 to July 1937 were years of humiliation and hard choices. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in Nanjing (Nanking) was weak, divided and fighting a civil war against the Communists. It gave ground in the north rather than risk a war it believed it would lose, and paid for that choice in territory, prestige and the anger of students, soldiers and provincial generals. By the end of 1936 that anger had boiled over at Xi’an, and by the summer of 1937 neither side in North China had much room left to back down (Coble, Facing Japan; Mitter, Forgotten Ally).

The story matters to Americans too. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria produced the first clear American statement against Japanese expansion, Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s non-recognition note of 7 January 1932, and the war that grew out of the Marco Polo Bridge led by stages to the oil embargo of 1941 and to Pearl Harbor. Chinese official history now counts a fourteen-year war of resistance that began at Mukden in 1931.

A railway, a leased territory and an army, 1905–1928

Japan’s position in Manchuria began with a war it fought against Russia, not China. Under the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed on 5 September 1905 with President Theodore Roosevelt as mediator, Russia handed Japan its lease on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, with the naval base at Port Arthur (Lüshun) and the port of Dalian (Dairen), and the southern part of the railway it had built across Manchuria, from Changchun south to the sea. China, which had not been a party to the war that was fought on its soil, accepted the transfer in a treaty signed at Beijing in December 1905. The leased area became the Kwantung Leased Territory; “Kwantung” (Guandong in pinyin) means “east of the pass,” the pass being Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea.

To run the railway Japan created the South Manchuria Railway Company, founded on 26 November 1906. It was much more than a railway. The company, known in Japanese as Mantetsu, ran coal mines at Fushun, ironworks at Anshan, hotels, schools, hospitals and a research bureau, and it administered the towns that grew up along a strip of land on either side of the track, the South Manchuria Railway Zone. Within the zone Japan exercised police and administrative powers, and by a protocol agreed with Russia in October 1905 each side could post railway guards at “15 per kilometer on the average” to protect its line (FRUS 1906, part 2, protocol of 30 October 1905). In 1915, in the notorious Twenty-One Demands, Japan forced China to extend the lease on the Kwantung territory and the railway to 99 years.

In 1919 Tokyo separated the civil government of the leased territory from its military command, and the garrison and railway guards became an independent army, the Kwantung Army, whose commander answered to the emperor and the army high command rather than to any civilian. It was small, about one division plus railway guard battalions, but it was far from Tokyo, and many of its staff officers saw Manchuria as the key to Japan’s security against the Soviet Union and the source of the coal, iron and soybeans a resource-poor Japan would need in a future war (Young, Japan’s Total Empire).

Manchuria itself was Chinese territory, governed after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 by the warlord Zhang Zuolin, a former bandit leader who had risen to command the Fengtian (Mukden) clique. Zhang ruled from Mukden (Shenyang) with Japanese tolerance and, at times, Japanese help. Millions of Chinese settlers poured into the region in the 1910s and 1920s, and Zhang built Chinese-owned railways that competed with the Japanese line. Japanese officers increasingly saw him as an obstacle rather than a client.

Huanggutun: the murder of Zhang Zuolin, 1928

In 1928 Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies, driving north in the Northern Expedition, closed in on Beijing, where Zhang Zuolin headed the internationally recognized government. Tokyo, under Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi, wanted Zhang to withdraw to Manchuria. He left Beijing by special train on the night of 2–3 June 1928. Early on 4 June, at Huanggutun outside Mukden, where the Chinese Beijing–Mukden railway passed beneath a bridge carrying the South Manchuria line, explosives planted on the bridge blew the carriages apart. Zhang died within hours.

The bombing was the work of a Kwantung Army staff officer, Col. Komoto Daisaku, and a few fellow officers who hoped it would set off disorder the army could use to take over Manchuria. It did not. Zhang’s staff concealed his death for days, his son Zhang Xueliang, the “Young Marshal,” took over smoothly, and the high command did not move. Komoto was merely retired, and Tanaka’s failure to punish the culprits as he had promised the emperor forced his resignation in July 1929. Many officers drew the lesson that such plots would go unpunished (Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria).

The murder also backfired politically. On 29 December 1928 Zhang Xueliang raised the Nationalist flag over Mukden and declared his allegiance to Nanjing, and he began to press the Japanese on their railway rights and their police in the railway zone. Incidents multiplied. In the summer of 1931 a clash between Chinese farmers and Korean settlers at Wanbaoshan, near Changchun, set off anti-Chinese riots in Korea, and Chinese troops in western Manchuria executed Capt. Nakamura Shintaro, a Japanese officer traveling in disguise on an intelligence mission. Japanese newspapers and army spokesmen made both affairs into national causes.

18 September 1931: the explosion at Liutiaohu

Two officers on the Kwantung Army staff had been planning a seizure of Manchuria since 1929. Col. Itagaki Seishiro, the senior staff officer, was the organizer. Lt. Col. Ishiwara Kanji, the operations officer, was the theorist, an eccentric strategist who believed Japan would one day fight a “final war” against the United States and needed Manchuria’s resources to prepare for it. With a few others, among them Maj. Hanaya Tadashi in Mukden, they planned to fake a Chinese attack on the railway as a pretext for occupying the region. That summer two heavy 24-centimeter siege guns were secretly installed in the Japanese garrison compound in Mukden (Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria; Mitter, The Manchurian Myth).

Rumors of the plot reached Tokyo, and the army ministry sent Maj. Gen. Tatekawa Yoshitsugu to Mukden, officially to restrain the Kwantung Army; Tatekawa, who sympathized with the plotters, arrived on 18 September and did not deliver his message. At about 2220 that night a small charge went off beside the South Manchuria Railway track at Liutiaohu, about a mile from the Chinese North Barracks (Beidaying) north of Mukden. Lt. Kawamoto Suemori of the railway guards had placed it. The damage was slight, and a southbound express passed over the spot a few minutes later and reached Mukden at about 2230 (Lytton Report, 1932).

The Kwantung Army reported that Chinese soldiers had blown up the railway and fired on a Japanese patrol. Within minutes Japanese troops attacked the North Barracks, where several thousand men of Zhang Xueliang’s 7th Brigade were stationed, and the siege guns opened fire. Other units attacked the walled city of Mukden. Zhang Xueliang was not even in Manchuria; he was in Beiping (Beijing had been renamed Beiping, “northern peace,” when the Nationalists made Nanjing the capital in 1928), where he had spent much of the year in poor health, with much of his army south of the Great Wall. He and the Nanjing government had told commanders to avoid giving the Japanese any pretext, and the troops in the North Barracks were ordered not to resist. By the morning of 19 September Mukden was in Japanese hands.

The Kwantung Army’s commander, Lt. Gen. Honjo Shigeru, approved the action once it began and ordered attacks all along the railway. The cabinet of Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijiro announced a policy of “non-expansion,” but the army in the field ignored it. On 21 September the Korea Army, under Lt. Gen. Hayashi Senjuro, sent a brigade across the Yalu River into Manchuria without imperial sanction, and the cabinet, facing a cheering public, approved the money after the fact (Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy).

In their words

An explosion undoubtedly occurred on or near the railroad between 10 and 10:30 p.m. on September 18th.

The truth about Liutiaohu came out in full only after 1945. Hanaya Tadashi described the plot in a postwar memoir, and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Tokyo tribunal, found that the incident had been planned by Kwantung Army officers, with Itagaki among the leaders. Japanese historians had established the main facts from army records by the 1960s. In China the date became the “9.18 Incident” (Jiuyiba), and 18 September is still marked each year with sirens in Shenyang and other cities.

The conquest of Manchuria and the Shanghai fighting of 1932

The Kwantung Army had about 10,000 to 11,000 men in September 1931. Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army numbered nearly a quarter of a million, but much of it was inside the Great Wall and its commander had chosen not to fight. On 8 October Japanese aircraft, directed by Ishiwara, bombed Jinzhou, where Zhang had set up his provincial government in exile; the air attack shocked opinion in Europe and America. In November, at the Nenjiang River bridge, the Heilongjiang commander Ma Zhanshan made a stand that won him fame across China, but the Japanese took Qiqihar on 19 November, Jinzhou on 3 January 1932 and Harbin on 5 February.

Four days after Jinzhou fell, on 7 January 1932, Stimson sent identical notes to China and Japan stating that the United States would not recognize any situation brought about by means contrary to the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928. The Stimson Doctrine carried no sanctions, but it put the United States on record against the conquest, a theme taken up in Chapter 8.

The anger in China over Manchuria took the form of a boycott of Japanese goods, strongest in Shanghai. On 18 January 1932 a crowd there beat five Japanese Nichiren Buddhist monks in the Chinese district of Zhabei; some historians believe the incident was arranged by Japanese agents to draw attention away from Manchuria. On the night of 28 January Japanese marines moved into Zhabei and ran into the Chinese 19th Route Army, under Jiang Guangnai and Cai Tingkai, which did not withdraw as Nanjing had expected. Japanese aircraft and naval guns set Zhabei on fire, destroying the Commercial Press, China’s largest publisher, and its Oriental Library.

The fighting lasted five weeks. Chiang sent the Fifth Army under Zhang Zhizhong, and Japan sent army divisions under Gen. Shirakawa Yoshinori, whose chief of staff was Tashiro Kanichiro, the officer who would command the China Garrison Army in 1937. The Japanese halted on 3 March, and a cease-fire agreement of 5 May 1932 barred Chinese troops from the area around the city. The battle was a rehearsal for the far larger one of 1937, told in Chapter 6.

Manchukuo, the Lytton Report and the League

The Kwantung Army’s planners had first wanted to annex Manchuria outright; faced with opposition, they settled on a nominally independent state. Its figurehead was Puyi, who had become emperor of China in 1908 at the age of two and abdicated in 1912. In November 1931 Doihara Kenji, the intelligence officer whose name appears at almost every stage of this story, spirited him out of Tianjin. On 1 March 1932 collaborating Chinese officials proclaimed the state of Manchukuo, and on 9 March Puyi was installed as Chief Executive at Changchun, renamed Hsinking (“new capital”). On 1 March 1934 he was enthroned as emperor, with the reign name Kangde.

Manchukuo was a Japanese creation from the start. Japan recognized it in the Japan–Manchukuo Protocol of 15 September 1932, which confirmed all Japanese rights and allowed Japanese troops to stay for the “joint defense” of both countries. The commander of the Kwantung Army was also Japan’s ambassador, and Japanese vice-ministers held the real power in every department. Yet, as Louise Young and Rana Mitter have shown, Manchukuo was also a vast project of investment and settlement in which many Japanese at home invested their hopes, and with which many Chinese in the northeast had to come to terms in order to live (Young, Japan’s Total Empire; Mitter, The Manchurian Myth).

China had appealed to the League of Nations on 21 September 1931. The League, unwilling to impose sanctions, appointed a commission of inquiry in December 1931 under the Earl of Lytton, a former governor of Bengal, with an American, Maj. Gen. Frank R. McCoy, and members from France, Germany and Italy. The commission spent about six weeks in Manchuria in the spring of 1932, visited the Liutiaohu site and interviewed officials of both sides while Japanese and Manchukuo police watched its movements. Its report was signed at Beiping in early September and published on 2 October 1932.

The Lytton Report acknowledged Japan’s treaty rights and the disorder of Chinese politics and proposed an autonomous Manchuria under Chinese sovereignty. But it found that the Japanese operations of 18 September were not legitimate self-defense and that Manchukuo was not the product of a spontaneous independence movement. On 24 February 1933 the League Assembly adopted the report by 42 votes to one, Japan voting against and Siam abstaining. The Japanese delegate, Matsuoka Yosuke, led his delegation out of the hall, and on 27 March 1933 Japan gave notice that it was leaving the League (Lytton Report; Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy).

Jehol, the Great Wall and the Tanggu Truce, 1933

Even before the League voted, the Kwantung Army had moved on. It claimed the province of Jehol (Rehe), the mountainous region north of the Great Wall between Manchuria and Beiping, as part of Manchukuo. On the night of 1 January 1933 an incident at Shanhaiguan, the fortified town where the Great Wall reaches the sea and where the Beijing–Mukden railway passes through it, gave the Japanese their opening. Japanese troops, supported by tanks, aircraft and naval gunfire, drove the Chinese regiment out of the town by 3 January.

The main offensive into Jehol began on 23 February 1933. The province’s governor, Tang Yulin, a former Fengtian general with a reputation for opium dealing, made little effort to defend it. Chifeng fell on 2 March, and on 4 March a small Japanese column with cavalry and a tank company entered the provincial capital, Chengde, the old summer retreat of the Qing emperors, almost unopposed. Tang had fled. The loss of Jehol in less than two weeks caused an outcry in China, and Zhang Xueliang, who bore the blame for Manchuria and now for Jehol, resigned his command in March and went abroad (Coble, Facing Japan).

At the Great Wall passes the Chinese did resist. At Gubeikou, on the road from Chengde to Beiping, Nationalist divisions held for weeks from early March. At Xifengkou, units of the old Northwestern Army, among them Song Zheyuan’s 29th Army, fought hand-to-hand night actions with the broad-bladed dadao sword, and the “big sword teams” became a national legend. Short of artillery and aircraft, the Chinese gave up Xifengkou on 8 April and Lengkou on 11 April. In May Japanese columns crossed the Wall into northeastern Hebei, and the Chinese pulled back from their last positions around 20 May.

Chiang, convinced that China could not yet fight Japan and determined to finish the Communists first, chose to negotiate. On 31 May 1933, at the port of Tanggu near Tianjin, Maj. Gen. Okamura Yasuji, deputy chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, and Lt. Gen. Xiong Bin signed a military truce. Chinese troops withdrew behind a line running roughly from Yanqing through Changping, Shunyi and Tongzhou to Lutai, and the Japanese fell back to the Great Wall. The zone in between, roughly 100 kilometers deep, was to be demilitarized and policed by a lightly armed Chinese Peace Preservation Corps, with Japanese aircraft free to check compliance. The truce did not mention Manchukuo, but by leaving the Wall in Japanese hands it accepted the loss of Manchuria and Jehol in fact. Beiping now lay at the edge of a zone the Japanese army could enter at will (Coble, Facing Japan).

1935: He–Umezu, Qin–Doihara and the push for North China “autonomy”

For about two years after Tanggu the north was quiet on the surface. In the “Amau statement” of 17 April 1934 Japan’s Foreign Ministry warned other powers against giving China military or financial help (IMTFE judgment), and Nanjing quietly negotiated the resumption of through rail traffic and postal links with Manchukuo without recognizing it.

In 1935 the Japanese army in North China and the Kwantung Army began a new campaign of pressure. Their aim, set out in staff papers that the Tokyo tribunal later examined, was to separate the five northern provinces (Hebei, Chahar, Suiyuan, Shanxi and Shandong) from Nanjing’s control and turn them into a buffer zone friendly to Japan, much as Manchukuo had been made out of the northeast. The method was the same as before: a local incident, a set of demands far wider than the incident, and a threat of force.

The first incident came in May 1935, when two pro-Japanese newspaper publishers were assassinated in the Japanese concession at Tianjin. The China Garrison Army presented demands to He Yingqin, Chiang’s war minister and acting head of the military council at Beiping, while Japanese armored cars paraded past the Chinese offices and Kwantung Army units moved up to the Great Wall. On 10 June 1935 He accepted. The Hebei provincial chairman was removed, the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) closed its branches in Hebei, including Beiping and Tianjin, central army units left the province, and anti-Japanese groups were banned. The settlement became known as the He–Umezu Agreement, after He and Lt. Gen. Umezu Yoshijiro, commander of the China Garrison Army. China said it had only accepted Japanese “suggestions”; the Tokyo tribunal found that it amounted to a major limitation of Chinese sovereignty (IMTFE judgment, ch. V).

A second incident followed at once. In June 1935 troops of the 29th Army in Chahar briefly detained Japanese army personnel traveling without permits near Zhangbei. On 27 June the acting Chahar chairman, Qin Dechun, and Doihara Kenji agreed that the 29th Army would leave most of Chahar north of the Great Wall and that the Kuomintang and anti-Japanese activity would be banned there too. As the Tokyo tribunal noted, the most important terms had little to do with the incident that excused them (IMTFE judgment, ch. V).

In the autumn of 1935 the Japanese went further. Gen. Minami Jiro of the Kwantung Army sent Doihara to Beiping to persuade the northern generals, Song Zheyuan above all, to declare an autonomous regime. When promises failed, Doihara turned in November to threats, backed by a striking force at Shanhaiguan (IMTFE judgment, ch. V). The generals hedged; none wanted to become another Puyi.

East Hebei, smuggling and the Hebei–Chahar Political Council

Where the generals would not move, the Japanese found a lesser figure who would. Yin Rugeng (Yin Ju-keng), a Japanese-educated official who administered the demilitarized zone, declared it autonomous on 15 November 1935, and on 25 November he proclaimed the East Hebei Anti-Communist Autonomous Council, later styled a government, with its capital at Tongzhou, about 13 miles east of Beiping. It claimed 22 counties of the demilitarized zone, stretching from the Great Wall almost to the walls of the old capital, and Japanese garrison troops were stationed at Tongzhou. Nanjing protested and ordered Yin’s arrest, to no effect (IMTFE judgment, ch. V).

East Hebei’s most damaging activity was economic. Because the Tanggu Truce kept Chinese armed forces out of the zone, it became an open door for smuggling. In 1936 Japanese and Korean traders moved large quantities of rayon, sugar, kerosene and other goods from Dalian into the zone, paid East Hebei a small fee far below the national tariff, and sent them on into the rest of China. Customs revenue, which secured China’s foreign loans and was Nanjing’s largest source of income, fell sharply at Tianjin. In May 1936 the British ambassador told Japan’s foreign minister that the smuggling was doing “great damage” to legitimate trade and could wreck the customs service (FRUS 1936, vol. IV; House of Commons, 29 April 1936). Japan denied any political motive.

Nanjing answered with a compromise. On 18 December 1935 it set up the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, with Song Zheyuan as chairman, to govern the two provinces and the cities of Beiping and Tianjin. The council reported to the Executive Yuan in Nanjing but was expected to accommodate Japanese demands; Doihara reported that it would “more or less obey the Kwantung Army” (IMTFE judgment, ch. V). For the next eighteen months Song played a double game, courteous to the Japanese, unwilling to break with Nanjing, and determined above all to keep his 29th Army.

The autonomy campaign set off the largest student protests since 1919. On 9 December 1935 several thousand students from Yenching, Tsinghua, Peking and other universities marched through Beiping in freezing weather against autonomy and against Japan, and police turned fire hoses and clubs on them. A larger march followed on 16 December. The December Ninth Movement spread to other cities, many of its leaders later joined the Communist Party, and resistance to Japan became the test of patriotism in Chinese politics (Mitter, Forgotten Ally).

1936: a larger garrison and the move to Fengtai

The Japanese troops who would be at the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937 belonged not to the Kwantung Army but to the China Garrison Army at Tianjin. It traced its origins to the Boxer Protocol of 7 September 1901, which allowed the powers whose legations had been besieged in 1900 to keep guards at the legations and at points along the railway from Beijing to the sea. Japan, Britain, France, Italy and the United States all kept troops in North China under the protocol; the American contingent included the Marine legation guard at Beiping and, until 1938, the Army’s 15th Infantry Regiment at Tianjin.

In the spring of 1936, after the army mutiny of 26 February in Tokyo had brought in the cabinet of Hirota Koki, Japan enlarged the garrison and raised its status. From April it received additional infantry companies and a mixed regiment, and its commander became an officer appointed directly by the emperor, Lt. Gen. Tashiro Kanichiro, who arrived on 19 May 1936 (FRUS 1936, vol. IV). American diplomats thought part of the purpose was to keep the Kwantung Army out of North China policy, but the effect was to put thousands more Japanese soldiers among the Chinese garrisons around Beiping. The garrison’s infantry now formed a brigade of two regiments; the 1st Infantry Regiment, commanded by Col. Mutaguchi Renya in 1937, had battalions in Beiping and at Fengtai.

Fengtai was the key. A railway junction about six miles southwest of Beiping’s walls, it was not named in the Boxer Protocol as a place where foreign troops could be stationed. In May 1936 the Japanese posted a battalion there (IMTFE judgment), alongside Chinese troops of the 29th Army. After a clash during Japanese maneuvers on 18 September 1936, the fifth anniversary of Mukden, the Japanese demanded that the Chinese garrison leave, and Song Zheyuan agreed. The Tokyo tribunal later called the Fengtai affair the “stage-setting” for the incident at the bridge (IMTFE judgment, ch. V). From Fengtai, Japanese units marched out to train on open ground near Wanping and the bridge a few miles to the west, the subject of Chapter 2.

How large the garrison actually became is less certain than it seems. The American embassy in Tokyo reported in May 1936 that the garrison would rise to “about 4300 officers and men, or to 4675 if additional field artillery is to be sent,” and in late June that the reinforcements had arrived and the garrison numbered “slightly under 5,000 men” (FRUS 1936, vol. IV). A year later, American officers in China collected estimates ranging from 4,000 to more than 9,000, and the embassy noted that Japanese figures could not be checked (FRUS 1937, vol. III). The chart below shows how far the estimates spread.

By the numbers

How big was the Japanese garrison in North China?

Estimates of the China Garrison Army’s strength, May 1936 to spring 1937 (officers and men)

Japanese officers, May 1936about 4,000

U.S. military attaché, May 1936 (forecast)4,300–4,675

U.S. embassy, Tokyo, June 1936under 5,000

Japanese embassy secretary, 19375,000

Unofficial Japanese sources, 1936over 8,000

U.S. assistant military attaché, 19378,000–9,000

Chinese official, 1937over 9,000

U.S. naval attaché, spring 19379,200

The Chinese side was larger but no easier to count. The American military attaché put Song Zheyuan’s 29th Army at 51,800 men in January 1937, 36,800 in Hebei and 15,000 in Chahar; British and Japanese attachés had estimated 60,000 in 1935; an embassy despatch of 1936 credited Song with “more than 80,000 troops”; and some Chinese officials said 100,000 (FRUS 1936, vol. IV; FRUS 1937, vol. III). The army had four divisions, the 37th, 38th, 132nd and 143rd, and little artillery. A battalion of the 37th Division’s 219th Regiment held Wanping, at the east end of the Marco Polo Bridge.

Elsewhere, 1936 brought more Japanese-backed adventures. In November Mongol and Chinese irregulars armed and advised by Kwantung Army officers invaded Suiyuan province, and the provincial commander Fu Zuoyi defeated them, taking their base at Bailingmiao on 24 November. The small victory set off celebrations across China. In the autumn the killing of Japanese nationals at Chengdu and Beihai led to tense talks in Nanjing, and for the first time the Chinese government refused most of Japan’s demands. On 25 November 1936 Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany.

“Internal pacification first”: Chiang, the Communists and Xi’an

Chiang Kai-shek’s policy toward Japan rested on a phrase he used repeatedly: rang wai bi xian an nei, “to resist the outside, first pacify the inside,” usually rendered as “internal pacification before external resistance.” He believed China’s army and finances could not yet sustain a war with Japan, and that a war fought while the Communists held territory in the interior would destroy his government. So he traded space for time in the north and threw his best troops against the Communists, whose survivors reached northern Shaanxi in 1935 at the end of the Long March (Taylor, The Generalissimo).

Chiang also used those years to prepare. German advisers, led from 1934 by Gen. Hans von Seeckt and then Gen. Alexander von Falkenhausen, helped him train a core of modern divisions and fortify the approaches to Nanjing. Historians still argue over whether the policy of delay was prudent or fatal: Coble stresses how the concessions undermined the Nationalists with students, the press and provincial generals, while Taylor and van de Ven stress how weak China’s army was and how much it gained from the time.

The policy broke down at Xi’an. After the Long March, Chiang ordered Zhang Xueliang, back from Europe and commanding the Northeastern Army from Xi’an, to finish off the Communists in Shaanxi, with Yang Hucheng’s Northwestern Army in support. Neither wanted to fight. Zhang’s soldiers were exiles from Manchuria who wanted to fight Japan and go home, and secret contacts with the Communists had produced a quiet truce. Chiang flew to Xi’an on 4 December 1936 to push the offensive and stayed at the Huaqing Pool hot springs at Lintong, about ten miles east of the city. On 9 December, the anniversary of the Beiping protests, thousands of students in Xi’an marched toward Lintong to petition him to resist Japan; Chiang ordered Zhang to stop them, and Zhang talked them into turning back.

At about 0500 on 12 December 1936 a few hundred of Zhang’s guards, led by Capt. Sun Mingjiu, attacked the Huaqing Pool compound. Chiang’s bodyguards fought back and several were killed. Chiang escaped over the back wall, hurting his back, and was found hours later hiding on the snowy slope of Mount Li. Yang Hucheng’s troops seized Xi’an. Zhang and Yang telegraphed eight demands to the nation, among them a government open to all parties, an end to the civil war, the release of political prisoners, and immediate resistance to Japan.

For two weeks China held its breath. In Nanjing, He Yingqin and others favored a punitive expedition and the bombing of Xi’an, which might well have killed Chiang. Soong Mei-ling and her brother T. V. Soong worked for a negotiated release; he flew to Xi’an on 20 December and she followed on 22 December. The Communists sent Zhou Enlai, and Moscow, which saw Chiang as the only leader who could unite China against Japan, pressed for his release. Chiang signed nothing, but on 24 December he met Zhou and gave his word on the main points. On Christmas Day Zhang Xueliang released him and, in a gesture that cost him his liberty, flew with him to Nanjing, arriving on 26 December (Taylor, The Generalissimo; van de Ven, China at War).

Chiang returned to Nanjing a national hero. Zhang Xueliang was court-martialed on 31 December and sentenced to ten years, commuted to house arrest that lasted, on the mainland and then on Taiwan, until 1990. The civil war stopped, and in the first half of 1937 Nationalist and Communist representatives negotiated a second united front, formally concluded only after the war began. The Japanese army read Xi’an as a sign that China was uniting against it, and some officers concluded that it would be better to strike before China grew stronger.

On the eve: January to early July 1937

The first half of 1937 brought a brief easing in Tokyo. The foreign minister of Gen. Hayashi Senjuro’s short-lived cabinet, Sato Naotake, talked of treating China as an equal. Ishiwara Kanji, now chief of operations on the Army General Staff, had come to believe that Japan should avoid war with China and build up Manchukuo against the Soviet Union. But Hayashi fell at the end of May, and on 4 June 1937 Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a popular aristocrat with no firm control over the army, became prime minister. In North China the garrison and Kwantung Army staffs remained convinced that a firm hand would bring Song Zheyuan into line (Crowley, 1963).

Around Beiping the two armies lived side by side in growing tension. From June 1937, the Tokyo tribunal found, Japanese units carried out intensive night exercises near the Marco Polo Bridge, often without the advance notice local practice required (IMTFE judgment, ch. V). Chinese officers suspected that the Japanese meant to seize Wanping, which guarded the crossings of the Yongding River by the old road and the Beiping–Hankou railway. Song Zheyuan had left Beiping in May for his home district in Shandong and was still away when the shooting began.

On the evening of 7 July 1937 a company of the 3rd Battalion of Mutaguchi’s 1st Infantry Regiment, under Maj. Ichiki Kiyonao, marched out from Fengtai for a night exercise on the flat ground north of Wanping, between the town and the Dragon King Temple (Longwangmiao) on the river embankment. At about 2240 shots were heard. What happened next is told in Chapter 3.

Timeline

The road to the bridge, 1901–1937

1. 7 Sep 1901Boxer Protocol allows foreign troops to guard the Beijing legations and the railway to the sea.
2. 5 Sep 1905Treaty of Portsmouth gives Japan the Kwantung lease and the railway south of Changchun.
3. 26 Nov 1906South Manchuria Railway Company founded.
4. 4 Jun 1928Kwantung Army officers kill Zhang Zuolin at Huanggutun.
5. 18 Sep 1931Explosion at Liutiaohu; Kwantung Army seizes Mukden by morning.
6. 7 Jan 1932Stimson non-recognition note.
7. 28 Jan–3 Mar 1932Fighting at Shanghai; cease-fire agreement signed 5 May.
8. 1 Mar 1932Manchukuo proclaimed; Puyi installed as Chief Executive on 9 March.
9. 2 Oct 1932Lytton Report published.
10. 24 Feb 1933League Assembly adopts the Lytton Report, 42 to 1; Japan walks out.
11. 4 Mar 1933Japanese enter Chengde; Jehol falls.
12. 31 May 1933Tanggu Truce.
13. 1 Mar 1934Puyi enthroned as emperor of Manchukuo.
14. 10 Jun 1935He–Umezu Agreement.
15. 27 Jun 1935Qin–Doihara Agreement.
16. 25 Nov 1935East Hebei regime proclaimed at Tongzhou.
17. 9 Dec 1935December Ninth student demonstration in Beiping.
18. 18 Dec 1935Hebei–Chahar Political Council established under Song Zheyuan.
19. Apr–May 1936China Garrison Army enlarged; Tashiro takes command; battalion posted at Fengtai.
20. 18 Sep 1936Clash at Fengtai; Chinese troops later withdraw from the town.
21. 24 Nov 1936Fu Zuoyi takes Bailingmiao in Suiyuan.
22. 12–25 Dec 1936Xi’an Incident.
23. 4 Jun 1937Konoe Fumimaro becomes prime minister.
24. 7 Jul 1937Shots near the Marco Polo Bridge, about 2240.

People

Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949), operations officer of the Kwantung Army in 1931, was the chief planner of the Mukden Incident and the conquest of Manchuria. A military theorist who predicted a “final war” between Japan and the United States, he later turned against expansion into China proper. As chief of operations of the General Staff in July 1937 he argued against sending large forces to North China and lost. He fell out with Tojo Hideki, was forced into retirement in 1941, was not charged at Tokyo, and died in 1949.

Itagaki Seishiro (1885–1948), senior staff officer of the Kwantung Army in 1931, organized the Mukden plot and the creation of Manchukuo. He served as war minister in 1938–39 and commanded in China and Southeast Asia. The Tokyo tribunal convicted him of war crimes and crimes against peace, and he was hanged on 23 December 1948.

Doihara Kenji (1883–1948), an intelligence officer who spoke fluent Chinese, brought Puyi out of Tianjin in 1931, negotiated the Qin–Doihara Agreement and drove the North China autonomy campaign of 1935. Western newspapers called him the “Lawrence of Manchuria.” He was hanged with Itagaki in December 1948.

Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001), the “Young Marshal,” succeeded his murdered father in Manchuria in 1928, brought the northeast under the Nationalist flag, and lost it without a fight in 1931. His seizure of Chiang at Xi’an in December 1936 helped bring about the united front. He spent more than half a century under arrest, moved to Hawaii after his release, and died in Honolulu at the age of 100.

Puyi (1906–1967), last emperor of the Qing dynasty, was Chief Executive (1932) and then emperor (1934–45) of Manchukuo. Captured by Soviet troops in August 1945, he testified at the Tokyo tribunal, was held in China’s Fushun prison from 1950, was pardoned in 1959, and worked as a gardener and archivist in Beijing until his death.

Song Zheyuan (1885–1940), a general of Feng Yuxiang’s old Northwestern Army, commanded the 29th Army at the Great Wall in 1933 and chaired the Hebei–Chahar Political Council from December 1935. Trying to keep both Nanjing and Tokyo at bay, he became the man in the middle at the Marco Polo Bridge. He died of illness in Sichuan in 1940.

Tashiro Kanichiro (1881–1937), chief of staff at Shanghai in 1932, took command of the enlarged China Garrison Army in May 1936. He was gravely ill when the fighting at the bridge began and died at Tianjin in mid-July 1937.

Losses and uncertainty

The six years before the Marco Polo Bridge were not a single war, and nobody kept a single count of their dead. What survives is a set of figures for particular campaigns, each issued by one side and rarely checked by the other.

Manchuria, 1931–33. The conventional fighting of 1931–32 was brief, and the Japanese losses in it were light. The longer and bloodier struggle was the guerrilla war waged by the Northeastern volunteer armies, former soldiers, local militias, secret societies and bandit bands, which tied down Japanese and Manchukuo forces for years. Japanese reports called all of them “bandits,” which makes Japanese counts of enemy dead impossible to separate into soldiers and civilians. Chinese figures for civilian deaths in reprisals, such as the massacre at Pingdingshan near Fushun in September 1932, are disputed in their details. No reliable total exists for the region.

Shanghai, 1932. The Chinese army reported 4,215 killed, 9,830 wounded and 756 missing among its soldiers. Japan reported 738 killed and 2,257 wounded. Western estimates of Chinese military dead run from about 3,000 to 4,000, and one Western count put civilian deaths at about 10,000; Zhabei was largely burned. These figures come from the Chinese and Japanese official returns as summarized in standard reference works; the civilian estimate is the least certain.

Jehol and the Great Wall, 1933. Chinese official figures for 1 January to 24 May 1933 give 518 officers and 15,248 men killed, and 1,122 officers and 21,501 men wounded. Japanese and Manchukuo losses for the whole campaign are given as about 2,400 killed and wounded, a figure from the Japanese side. The gap reflects real differences in firepower, but also the usual tendency of each side to count its own losses carefully and its enemy’s generously.

The armies of 1936–37. Estimates of the Japanese China Garrison Army ran from about 4,000 to 9,200, and of Song Zheyuan’s 29th Army from 51,800 to 100,000 (FRUS 1937, vol. III). The differences come from what was counted (combat troops or all personnel, regular divisions or local peace preservation units), from Japanese officials’ interest in understating how far beyond the Boxer Protocol the garrison had grown, and from Chinese commanders’ interest in inflating their strength to draw more pay and supplies from Nanjing. The Tokyo tribunal, looking back, spoke of a Japanese force in North China of roughly 7,000 to 15,000 (IMTFE judgment, ch. V).

The disputed facts. On Mukden, the evidence is now settled: Japanese officers set off the explosion. On the 1935 agreements, the dispute is legal rather than factual. Japan treated them as binding commitments; China treated them as local measures accepted under duress, and the He–Umezu “agreement” in particular was never signed as a treaty. That disagreement mattered in July 1937, when each side accused the other of violating arrangements the other did not accept.

Questions readers ask

Did Japan stage the Mukden Incident?

Yes. Kwantung Army officers, led by Itagaki Seishiro and Ishiwara Kanji, planned the explosion at Liutiaohu on 18 September 1931, and a Japanese lieutenant placed the charge. The Lytton Commission found in 1932 that the explosion did not justify Japan’s military action. Postwar testimony, Japanese army records and the findings of the Tokyo tribunal confirmed that the attack was staged. Japanese historians accept this.

Why did China not fight back in Manchuria in 1931?

Zhang Xueliang and the Nanjing government believed that China’s armies could not win a war with Japan and hoped that the League of Nations and the treaty powers would force Japan to withdraw. Chiang was also fighting the Communists and dealing with rival generals. Zhang’s troops were ordered not to resist, and much of his army was south of the Great Wall. Some commanders, such as Ma Zhanshan at the Nenjiang bridge, fought anyway.

What was Manchukuo?

A state proclaimed in Manchuria on 1 March 1932, with the former Qing emperor Puyi as its head, first as Chief Executive and from 1934 as emperor. It was nominally independent, but the Kwantung Army and Japanese officials controlled it. The League of Nations refused to recognize it, and Japan left the League rather than give it up. It lasted until the Soviet invasion of August 1945.

Why were Japanese troops near Beiping in 1937 at all?

Because of the Boxer Protocol of 1901, which allowed the foreign powers to keep troops at the Beijing legations and along the railway to the sea. Japan used that right far beyond its original purpose. In 1936 it enlarged its China Garrison Army without Chinese consent and posted troops at Fengtai, which the protocol did not name. The Tanggu Truce of 1933 and the agreements of 1935 had already pushed Nationalist forces out of much of the region around the city.

Did the Xi’an Incident cause the war?

Not directly, but it changed the conditions. It ended the Nationalist campaign against the Communists and started the talks that produced a second united front. Chiang came back with greater prestige and less freedom to make concessions to Japan. Some Japanese officers concluded that China was becoming stronger and more hostile and that Japan should act sooner rather than later.

How it connects

This chapter sets the stage. The next, Chapter 2: The Bridge, the Town and the Garrisons, looks closely at the ground where the war began, the 800-year-old Lugou Bridge, the walled town of Wanping, the railway bridge and Fengtai, and at the Chinese and Japanese units posted there in July 1937. Chapter 3 tells the night of 7 July itself, and Chapter 4 follows the twenty days of talks and reinforcements that turned a local incident into a war. Many of the same men, Song Zheyuan, Mutaguchi Renya, Konoe Fumimaro and Chiang Kai-shek, carry the story forward.

The American thread begins here too. The Stimson Doctrine of 1932 was the first step on a road that ran through Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech and the sinking of the USS Panay in 1937, told in Chapter 8, to the oil embargo of 1941 and the attack described in the Pearl Harbor collection. Japan’s demand in 1941 that the United States accept its position in China, including Manchukuo, was one of the issues that negotiations could not resolve.

What happened afterward

Within a month of the shots at the bridge, the arrangements built up over six years collapsed. The Japanese took Beiping and Tianjin at the end of July 1937. At Tongzhou, on 29 July, the East Hebei regime’s own Chinese militia mutinied and killed Japanese and Korean residents, an event told in Chapter 5. The Hebei–Chahar Political Council was dissolved on 20 August 1937, and East Hebei was folded into a new Japanese-sponsored Provisional Government in Beiping in February 1938. The China Garrison Army itself was broken up in August 1937, its units absorbed into the North China Area Army.

Manchukuo lasted until August 1945, when Soviet armies overran it in little more than a week and captured Puyi at Mukden airfield. Itagaki and Doihara were hanged after the Tokyo trial on 23 December 1948, and Umezu, who signed the surrender aboard USS Missouri as chief of the Army General Staff, died in prison in 1949. Ishiwara, the architect of Mukden, was never indicted. Komoto Daisaku died in Chinese custody in 1955.

In China the “loss of the northeast” and the December Ninth Movement became central to the Communist account of the war, and Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng were honored on the mainland as patriots. In 2017 China’s Ministry of Education told textbook writers to describe the war of resistance as a fourteen-year war beginning in 1931.

Walking the ground today

Start in Shenyang, the old Mukden. The 9.18 Historical Museum stands at 46 Wanghua South Street near the Liutiaohu site. It opened in 1991 on the 60th anniversary of the incident, and a much larger building was completed on 18 September 1999. Its exhibits, captioned in Chinese, Japanese and English, cover the explosion, the occupation and the resistance. Each year on the night of 18 September city leaders sound its bell, inscribed “Never forget our national humiliation” (Hiroshima Peace Media Center). In central Shenyang the Zhang family mansion, home and headquarters of Zhang Zuolin and Zhang Xueliang, is now a museum.

In Changchun, the Manchukuo capital of Hsinking, Puyi’s palace compound survives as the Museum of the Imperial Palace of Manchukuo, and many Manchukuo ministry buildings still line the city’s avenues.

Shanhaiguan, the gate in the Great Wall where the fighting of January 1933 began, is now a district of Qinhuangdao in Hebei. Its “First Pass Under Heaven” gate tower and the “Old Dragon’s Head,” where the Wall runs into the Bohai Sea, are among China’s best-known tourist sites. Farther west, much of the wall around Xifengkou, where the 29th Army’s sword teams fought in 1933, now lies partly under the waters of the Panjiakou Reservoir. At Gubeikou, north of Beijing, unrestored sections of the Wall still overlook the road from Chengde.

At Lintong, east of Xi’an, the Huaqing Pool resort shows the buildings where Chiang stayed, and on Mount Li above them the Armed Remonstrance Pavilion (Bingjian Ting) marks where he was found. In Beijing, the universities where the December Ninth marches began have memorials to the movement, and Tongzhou, the East Hebei capital, is now the city’s administrative subcenter. The bridge, Wanping and the national war museum inside Wanping’s walls are described in Chapter 9.

Sources and further reading

• League of Nations, Appeal by the Chinese Government: Report of the Commission of Enquiry (the Lytton Report), Geneva, 1 October 1932; quoted passages as given in the Pearl Harbor History Associates’ chronology of 1931 (ibiblio.org). Background: “Lytton Report” (commission members and dates).
• International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Judgment (November 1948), Chapter V, “Japanese Aggression against China,” sections III–IV, via HyperWar: He–Umezu and Qin–Doihara agreements, the East Hebei regime, the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, Fengtai and the night maneuvers of June 1937.
• U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (Office of the Historian): 1906, part 2, doc. 187 (Russo-Japanese protocol of 30 October 1905 on railway guards); 1936, vol. IV, doc. 153 (Grew, 23 May 1936); doc. 210 (Grew, 24 June 1936); doc. 221 (embassy review of North China, first half of 1936); doc. 126 (British protest on smuggling, May 1936); 1937, vol. III, doc. 62 (estimates of the Japanese garrison and the 29th Army).
• UK Parliament, House of Commons debates, 29 April 1936, questions on smuggling into North China.
• 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).
• Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 1991).
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; British edition China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945); and The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (University of California Press, 2000).
• Hans van de Ven, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, 1937–1952 (Harvard University Press, 2018); Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009); 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).
• Sadako N. Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931–1932 (University of California Press, 1964); Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (University of California Press, 1998); Christopher Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931–1933 (Hamish Hamilton, 1972).
• Reference summaries consulted for dates and official casualty returns: “Mukden incident,” “January 28 incident,” “Defense of the Great Wall,” “Tanggu Truce,” “He–Umezu Agreement,” “East Hebei Autonomous Government,” “Hebei–Chahar Political Council,” “Japanese China Garrison Army,” “Xi’an Incident,” and “South Manchuria Railway” (English Wikipedia, consulted October 2026).
• Hiroshima Peace Media Center, “9.18 History Museum (Shenyang, China)”; Shaanxi Provincial Government, history page on the Xi’an Incident sites.

Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, from Japanese and Chinese press photographs of 1928–1936 (public domain in their countries of origin and the United States) and from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s collection of 1932–33 press photographs (public domain).