Even if the Xi’an Incident did not lead to an immediate agreement between the Nationalists and the Communists, three things had changed. The incident had made clear exactly where the Soviet Union stood. Chiang Kaishek was their man in China; Stalin was prepared to order the Communists to support him; and they had done so. Secondly, the incident removed the Fengtian Army as a significant force in north China. Before the Japanese ejected it from Manchuria in 1931–2, it had been a powerful force of 150,000 troops or so, well stocked with arms from the Shenyang arsenal. The Fengtian Army had retreated into north China, but over time dissatisfaction and demoralisation had spread through its ranks. Following the Xi’an Incident, the army was initially transferred to the provinces of Henan and Anhui, then its units were distributed to other commands. Chiang Kaishek had removed the most serious military threat to Nanjing in north China.36 The third change was that Chiang’s stature had increased and that he had come to see himself as carrying the fate of the country on his shoulders.
The Throw of the Dice
Even though Chiang Kaishek returned to Nanjing a national hero, his back was still giving him pain and he remained in poor health for six months. A period of respite to recover from his wounds was extended twice, until the end of May. During this time Chiang frequently went back to his beloved home-town of Xikou. His first, depressing task was to arrange the burial of his older brother, Chiang Jieqing, who had collapsed when he heard that his younger brother had been taken captive. He never recovered and died on 27 December.37 Jieqing had a significant political career of his own, having served as a district magistrate and as a member of the governing council of Zhejiang province. His death meant that Chiang Kaishek became the pater familias, responsible for managing the affairs of the Chiang family. Chiang also had to bury one of his subordinates, General Zhang Peilun, who died in February 1937. A happier development was the return of his only son Ching-kuo from the Soviet Union. Ching-kuo had gone there to study in 1925 but had been detained as a hostage from 1927, when Chiang Kaishek had dismissed his Soviet advisors. Ching-kuo returned to Xikou with a blonde Russian wife just three days after the interment of his uncle. Ching-kuo, who had denounced his father while in Russia, was given a Chinese tutor and put to work in a remote location, probably to reacquaint him with Chinese customs and to test his loyalties.
Even the best Shanghai doctors were unable to cure Chiang Kaishek’s back.38 Abend reported to the US ambassador, Clarence Gauss, that when he interviewed Chiang in June 1937, he found him ‘not in good health’, wearing braces for his back and in constant pain.39 Chiang also suffered from terrible tooth-ache. The treatment for this was straightforward, if radical. In April, over the course of a number of days, Chiang had his remaining eight teeth pulled out in a Shanghai hospital. Once recovered, he felt ‘as if a great burden has been lifted’, but also had the realization that ‘I am beginning to age’.40 Throughout these months, Chiang complained in his diary of feeling overburdened, indecisive and listless. Only in early July did he regain a sense of equilibrium, writing on 1 July, ‘I did not sleep well, but I rose early and gave a lecture for one hour and a half without feeling tired: my strength is back.’41 By the time he had to face the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Chiang was beginning to feel both physically and mentally stronger.
Following the Xi’an Incident, Chiang was also optimistic that he could achieve the full reunification of China in ‘three to five years’.42 His focus was on dissolving the Fengtian Army and on bringing the forces of General Liu Xiang in Sichuan province to heel: ‘If we are able to unify and reorganise these two large old forces, then although the warlords of other provinces will still have many troops, they will be nothing to worry about.’43 While ‘maintaining the status quo’ in northern China, the immediate priority was ‘to secure Hunan, settle Sichuan, and consolidate Guangdong’.44 In terms of foreign affairs, Chiang focused on drawing Britain closer into Chinese affairs, sending his Minister of Finance, Kong Xiangxi, to London to discuss economic, intelligence and military cooperation.45 But an outbreak of fighting between Chinese and Japanese forces jerked history in a different direction.
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident
In the summer of 1937, Colonel Mutaguchi Renya, commander of the First Infantry Regiment of Japan’s China Garrison Army, was training his units as part of a radical military reform programme.46 First Infantry were stationed in north China by virtue of the Boxer Protocol of 1901, which gave foreign countries the right to station troops at the diplomatic missions in Beijing as well as along the railway line from Beijing to the port city of Tianjin. By 1937, with most foreign embassies having relocated to the new Nationalist capital at Nanjing, there remained little reason for foreign countries to keep troops in northern China, but Japan did. It had some 7,000 troops in the area, armed with artillery, tanks and aircraft.
Colonel Mutaguchi ordered drill after drill for his units, made up of both veterans and raw recruits straight from Japan, so that they would respond rapidly and aggressively to any incident. A recently introduced training manual stressed night-fighting capabilities to ensure that they could bring their skills to bear at a time of day when the enemy was at its most vulnerable. In early July, with the company-level training course completed, Mutaguchi shifted to battalion training, insisting on the use of live ammunition, not only to make the exercises realistic, but also because the local population, wearied by the incessant night-time disruption, had grown hostile. Exhausted by months of night-time training, worn down by the oppressive summer heat and operating among a resentful population, Mutaguchi’s units were on edge.
On 7 July, one unit under Mutaguchi’s command, Eighth Company, led by Captain Shimizu Setsuro, marched from their barracks with partial field pack (a small concession to the stifling humidity of a north China summer), canteen, ammunition, emergency rations and weapons through territory controlled by General Song Zheyuan’s 29th Army to their assigned training ground near Marco Polo Bridge, a twelfth-century bridge known for the beauty of its eleven arches. What happened next remains unclear to this day.
It may well be that ‘the trouble started when Chinese troops mistook a sham attack on Marco Polo Bridge for a real one’, as The Times of London reported.47 In any case, having heard gunshots, Captain Shimizu conducted a roll call which revealed that Private Shimura Kukujiro was missing. When Captain Shimizu heard more gunfire from the direction of the fortress city of Wanping, which guarded the eastern shore of Marco Polo Bridge, he demanded entrance to the city to conduct a search. As it was late at night, the Chinese duty officer at Wanping declined his request, arguing that such an action was bound to lead to disturbances. The following morning, Captain Shimizu’s forces, reinforced by troops from the Japanese legation guard at Beijing and the nearby town of Fengtai, began an assault on Wanping which lasted for five hours and ended, as Hallett Abend reported, when ‘the Chinese retreated under machine gun fire, suffering heavy losses. Scores of bodies were reported floating downstream.’48 Some 200 Chinese and ten Japanese lay dead.
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident became famous because of the chain of events it set in motion rather than because it was a particularly egregious instance of Japanese high-handedness. Although this it was. ‘It is no secret,’ as The Times stated, ‘that their military exercises and training proceed as if it were Japanese territory. The river at Marco Polo bridge is used as a target for artillery fire regardless of the farming activities of the Chinese peasant … Japanese soldiers have summarily arrested Chinese in the streets of Peking and even in their houses, and Chinese and foreign civilians have frequently been manhandled.’49 However, similar incidents had happened before.
Confronted once again with a spot of local difficulty, the Japanese and Chinese commanders on the scene quickly moved to de-escalate the situation and begin negotiations for a settlement. Had they been left alone, containment would likely have won the day. Decisions in Tokyo and Nanjing, however, ensured that the Marco Polo Bridge Incident came to mark the b
eginning of full-out war between China and Japan, a war that over the next seven years was to cause untold damage to China and, in its last year, to Japan as well.
Powerful voices in both countries clamoured for war. In Japan, two cabinet members, Muto Akira of the General Staff and the chief of the Military Affairs Department, Tanaka Shin’ichi, made the case for war.50 China, they argued, should be dealt with now, while it remained divided and its military reforms were far from complete. This was so that Japan would not have to worry about its rear when the time came to fight the Soviet Union, which was a far stronger and more dangerous opponent. A war would also have gone down well with considerable segments of the Japanese population, who were smarting from the effects of the 1930s depression, high levels of military expenditure, concentration on investment in heavy industry and disappointing returns from Japan’s empire-building plans, not just in Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, but also in north China.
In China, enthusiasm for war could be found in many places, too. Intellectuals, students, the Communists, civic organisations, the press and even some regional leaders – often generals without much loyalty to the central government in Nanjing – called for armed resistance against Japanese aggression. Many criticised Chiang Kaishek for failing to defend China. Every twist of the Japanese knife had been met with large demonstrations ‘to resist Japan and save the country’ in cities and towns across China, including Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, Wuhan and Changsha.51 After the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, ‘commercial, political, and patriotic organizations throughout the country swamped government officials at Nanking with telegrams, and newspapers and speakers voiced resentment’.52 At the second anniversary of the occupation, students across China vowed: ‘I swear to avenge national humiliation.’53 In 1935 Beijing witnessed ‘immense student demonstrations’ when autonomous governments were inaugurated in Hebei and Chahar in north China and Inner Mongolia, with the protestors shouting slogans such as ‘China for the Chinese’ and ‘Down with Japanese Imperialism’.54 In 1936, policemen in Tianjin had problems coping with student protests there,55 while in Chengdu, in the far-away province of Sichuan, Japanese offices were ransacked and some Japanese civilians killed.56 War was a popular option in China, too.
But there was no real rush to war. In Japan, Premier Konoye Fumimaro, who was a vacillating and worrying sort, had only recently been appointed. In the six months previously, two other administrations had come and gone. The political atmosphere was tense, with Japanese elites still in shock from a military coup by young officers in February 1936 which had led to the deaths of several senior politicians. Premier Konoye wanted stability, not adventure. Parts of Japan’s military were also reluctant to go to war at this point because a comprehensive military reform programme had only just begun. Even Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, one of the masterminds behind Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, who was now serving at the Tokyo High Command, argued that the policy of building up a string of autonomous regions across north China should be abandoned and that relations with Nanjing should be improved. This would ensure that Japan’s rear area would not become a threat if war broke out with the Soviet Union, which had strengthened its Far Eastern front. A revised Japanese war plan called for the avoidance of friction with China and insisted that any incident should be settled quickly and locally.57 Foreign Minister Sato Naotoko called for a ‘new start’ in relations with China, jettisoning earlier demands for China to recognise Manzhouguo and collaborate with Japan in the fight against communism.58
For the Chinese, if it did come to a full-blown conflict Chiang Kaishek could have no confidence in the outcome. His armies were inferior, the authority of his government in north China remained fragile at best, and some top commanders, government officials and public intellectuals were warning against escalation. George E. Taylor, an American educator who spent a few years in China advising on building up modern universities, spelled out the dangers in a prescient article published in the Manchester Guardian in February 1937:
Ordeal by battle, it is urged, would unite the nation. On a very long view this is probably true, but would the Nanking Government survive the ordeal? Those who think that China could resist in the interior provinces forget that the revenues of the National Government, such as Maritime Customs, Salt Administration and Railways, depend on the coastal provinces and big cities – the easiest objects for Japanese conquest. A government driven from the capital and cut off from Shanghai would be little more than a guerrilla band and its large unpaid armies willing material for the Communists … Millions of peasants have almost nothing to fight for, and these, in the disorder and economic dislocation which would necessarily be part of war, would find the problem of livelihood far more urgent than that of resisting the enemy.59
Chiang Kaishek was well aware of the risks. A few months later, he contemplated the possible outcomes of the war that had now begun. He worried that it would lead to a resurgence of the warlordism that racked China after the 1911 Revolution; that the Chinese Communists would ‘win over the masses’ and ‘seize political power’; that Japan and other foreign powers would agree a settlement that would end with China’s partition; that the Nationalists would split apart, with one grouping forming a ‘bogus government’; and that war would cause economic collapse and economic disintegration so that ‘the people will grow to hate the war and turn their backs on it’.60 Many of these nightmares would be realised.
Escalation to War
Japanese imperialism – that is, Japan’s desire to drive Western countries from east and south-east Asia and then colonise these areas – was the deep cause of the Second World War in east Asia. No country, if it had the means, would have tolerated the presence, let alone the high-handed actions, of foreign military units on its own territory. Had Japan’s leaders been more thoughtful about the strength of Chinese nationalism, more realistic about the essential weakness of their own position, and less keen to take affront, it might have dawned on them that by far the better response to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident was to forge ahead on evolving a workable settlement with the Chinese Nationalists.
Japan’s response to the incident got off to a bad start when Premier Konoye shied away from facing down Army Minister Sugiyama Hajime, who had called for a forceful response, including the despatch of three divisions to north China to beef up Japan’s China Garrison Army. On 11 July Konoye adopted the implausible policy of approving Sugiyama’s request on the condition that the accepted policy of non-expansion be maintained and that the troops were recalled if the situation changed.61 Konoye’s problem was that Sugiyama, who refused to discuss military affairs in cabinet on the grounds that he could not trust some of its civilian members, could bring down his government by resigning.62 In the Japanese constitutional system, as interpreted at the time, the army answered to the Emperor alone.
But it is not the case that Chiang Kaishek merely reacted to Japanese provocation, severe as it was. He based his actions on the belief that the Japanese were ‘strong on the outside, but brittle inside’.63 He judged that the Marco Polo Bridge Incident provided him with an opportunity to press Nanjing’s claims in northern China. He ordered the Nationalist 21st and 25th Divisions to the area, thinking, as he wrote in his diary, that he could pressure the Japanese into evacuating Fengtai, the town near the March Polo Bridge, abolish the ‘bogus East Hebei Autonomous Council’64 and smash the He-Umezu Agreement.65 Chiang gambled, as he had done before.
The situation soon span out of control. On 14 July, local Japanese military authorities declared that ‘the entry into Hopei [Hebei] Province of troops of the Chinese Central Government will violate the Tanggu Truce of June 1934 and will not be tolerated’.66 As Japanese forces poured into northern China, on 17 July Chiang Kaishek made his now famous ‘The Limit of Our Endurance’ speech from Lushan, a resort in the mountains of central China. ‘If Marco Polo Bridge is forcibly occupied by a third country, then Beijing, our ancient capital and the political, military and cultural centre of
north China, will become a second Shenyang,’ he declared, referring to the Shenyang Incident which resulted in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. ‘Hebei and Chahar,’ he warned, ‘will become like Manchuria … [and] Nanjing might well suffer the same fate as Shenyang. The outcome of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident therefore is a question for all of China.’ He concluded that ‘we have reached the limit. If a conflict is unavoidable, then the only option that remains is to fight a war of resistance and be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.’67
Chiang laid down as his conditions for a settlement that it would not infringe on China’s territorial integrity and sovereign rights and that no changes would be made to the existing military and political arrangements in north China.68 Chiang referred to the Boxer Protocol and the Tanggu Truce as treaties relevant to defining Japanese rights in the area. He could only disown those by rejecting international agreements, which would have undermined Nanjing’s inter nationalist strategy. But he did implicitly reject the He-Umezu Agreement, which was not an official treaty because it consisted merely of an exchange of letters and hence had no standing in international law.
On 16 July, having completed his encirclement of Beijing, General Katsuki, commander-in-chief of Japan’s China Garrison Force, handed an ultimatum to General Song Zheyuan, commander-in-chief of the Chinese 29th Army, demanding that units of the 37th Division in Beijing, as well as forces from west and north of Beijing, be withdrawn south ‘to guard against a recurrence of incidents’.69 The Japanese Army Ministry insisted that Nanjing should not stand in the way of a local settlement,70 something that Chiang Kaishek was unwilling to accept – understandably so, given that he regarded the Marco Polo Bridge Incident not as a local but as a national affair. As The Times reported, Nanjing was ‘fully committed to the non-recognition of any arrangements made without the approval of the National Government’.71
China at War Page 10
