movies, the audience was always instructed to stand and look under their
seats for pos si ble bombs.
After the ceasefire the Nineteenth Route Army was deployed to Fujian,
where it split from the Guomin dang. The Sun Fo cabinet fell and was re-
placed by a cabinet led by Wang Jing wei. Chiang Kai- shek returned to his
post as the head of the army and continued the fight against the Commu-
nists in Jiangxi. What ever unity had arisen in China during the Shanghai
battle was gone, and although all the factions espoused nationalism, each
seemed to turn the fight against the Japa nese to their own personal gain.
This aerial bombing by the Japa nese was one of the first bombings of a ci-
vilian population in history. The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica
in Spain, commemorated by Picasso’s famous painting, took place five years
later in 1937 and had a death toll of 400 to 1,600. By comparison, the Japa-
nese bombing of densely populated Shanghai in 1932 killed 5,000 or more.
Japan had never planned to invade all of China. With the pos si ble excep-
tion of Araki Sadao, most military leaders sought to avoid a full- scale inva-
sion of China.
Chiang Kai- shek’s Final Attempt to Appease Japan
In December 1932 the Saito cabinet approved the invasion of Rehe ( Jehol),
a province north of the Great Wall, covering an area of 114,000 square kilo-
meters. Chiang Kai- shek, who was preoccupied with the battles in Jiangxi,
pledged to join Zhang Xueliang to defend Rehe, but he was only paying lip
ser vice. Chiang assigned his weakest troops to the battle. Japan’s Kwantung
Army was eager to take the province before the spring thaw. It struck in
February with 20,000 troops. The local warlord, Tang Yulin, gave up without
a fight and mounted a retreat; he used 200 trucks to carry away his house hold
goods. As his soldiers began to pull back, they tried to sell their rifles to the
. 239 .
china and japan
Japa nese. Zhang Xueliang brought his troops to the border not to fight the
Japa nese but to disarm Tang’s soldiers before they could carry their weapons
south of the Great Wall.
Zhang Xueliang, who was forced to take responsibility for the defeat,
went into exile in Eu rope. This was con ve nient for Chiang Kai- shek because
it allowed him to avoid responsibility for the defeat, and it also eliminated
a potential rival.
The Kwantung Army then joined with the garrison forces in Tianjin and
started invading local areas south of the Great Wall, in defiance of an order
from Emperor Hirohito. Ironically, after Japan, represented by Matsuoka
Yosuke, walked out of the League of Nations in March 1933, the Kwan-
tung Army was no longer constrained by the pretense of international rules
of cooperation. Japan had become a rogue country, and the Kwantung Army
was a rogue army.
Chiang Kai- shek’s greatest concern was not to lose Tianjin or Beijing;
short of that, he was willing to compromise. So that his Nationalist gov-
ernment in Nanjing would not be held responsible for making concessions,
Chiang formed a po liti cal affairs council in Beijing to negotiate with the
Japa nese. Chiang called Huang Fu, who was fluent in Japa nese and well con-
nected in Japan, out of retirement and made him head of the council. The
two sides worked out an agreement that established a disarmament zone
from the Great Wall to Beijing. The agreement, known as the Tangku Truce
of May 31, 1933, was a scandal to any patriotic Chinese person. Surprisingly,
Hu Shi wrote an article in favor of the Tangku Truce because he saw it as
the only immediate way to save Beijing and Tianjin, but for many Nation-
alists, Hu Shi’s article put him on the enemies list. Huang Fu was held re-
sponsible and branded a traitor for making the agreement. As a sign of
things to come, Chiang Kai- shek, acutely aware of Japan’s growing ambi-
tions, gave the order to start packing the trea sures of the Imperial Palace
and getting them ready to be stored in the south.
Because of the Tangku Truce, Chiang Kai- shek was confronted with an
even stronger anti- Japanese movement that was highly critical of his ap-
peasement policies. The Chinese Communist Party became a vocal anti-
Japanese force, but at the time it did not have sufficient troops in place to
make a difference against Japan. The Guomin dang’s failure to respond boldly
. 240 .
Po liti cal Disorder and the Road to War, 1911–1937
to the Japa nese prob lem created a huge gap between the Nationalist Party
and the population.
From Tokyo’s perspective, the Tangku Truce was another in a long list
of arrangements made by its local military in China and then communi-
cated to Tokyo as a fait accompli. Tokyo had no plans and no strategies
for dealing with its troops in China that were popu lar with the Japa nese
public. The Manchurian Army not only had its own strategy but also its own
funds from the sale of opium from Rehe to Manchuria and other parts of
China.
With the Tangku Truce and the establishment of the demilitarized zone,
the period from 1933 through 1935 was relatively quiet for the Japa nese mil-
itary in North China. After transforming the puppet state of Manchuria
into Manchukuo, the military and a group of “reform bureaucrats” in the
Ministry of Commerce and Industry began investigating in earnest the po-
tential for natu ral resources extraction, industrialization, and hydroelectric
power generation in Manchuria. In 1935 Japan succeeded in purchasing the
Chinese Eastern Railroad from the Rus sians, which helped expand its rail
network in Manchuria.
Jiang Baili and China’s Strategy for Defeating Japan
When Liang Qichao, the great publicist, traveled to Eu rope in 1919, one of
five disciples who accompanied him was Jiang Baili. Because their funds
were modest, the Chinese visitors lived like students although they were
all prominent intellectuals in their respective fields, and they all wrote ar-
ticles for audiences back in China. During the trip, Jiang Baili wrote one of
his best- selling books on the Italian re nais sance.
Jiang had studied military science in both Japan and Germany, and he
was particularly shocked by the deadly scale of the battles and the changes
in military strategy in the Great War of 1914–1918. In Eu rope Jiang saw the
aftermath of trench warfare firsthand, along with the massive casualties in-
flicted by such technologically advanced weapons as tanks, howitzers, war-
planes, and poisonous gas. When he started out on the trip, Jiang Baili had
said that he was in search of the “light of dawn.” At the end of the journey,
he said that he had found it, because as he looked at the destruction in
. 241 .
china and japan
Eu rope, he saw the possibility of China prevailing in a war of re sis tance
against Japan.
Jiang Baili had graduated first in his class from Japan’s military acad emy
in 1906, after which he went to Germany to study military science. Many
Japa nese students at the acad emy had also gone to Eu rope. When
Jiang was
in Germany, Ugaki Kazushige was Japan’s military attaché, and Jiang was
invited to gatherings at the embassy with the Japa nese students. The cor-
nerstone of military science in Germany at that time was the strategy of
attacking with massive numbers of troops in order to win in short battles.
This was similar to what Jiang had learned in Japan, and it was the tactic
Japan had used in the Russo- Japanese War.
For Jiang Baili, his epiphany, the “light of dawn” he found in Eu rope, was
that the German tactics had failed. The strategy had failed, first, because
the Germans took a long route through Belgium to reach France that ex-
tended their supply lines and forced them to leave troops behind to occupy
Belgian towns. Most impor tant, though, was the fact that Germany was
fighting an offensive war, whereas the French were defending. Jiang con-
cluded that it is easier to motivate troops to resist than to attack as the
aggressor.
Since the days of his studies in Japan, Jiang Baili had been thinking that
someday Japan would again invade China. In his studies with Liang Qichao
in Yokohama, he read Fukuzawa Yukichi and, in Japa nese translation, Her-
bert Spencer. There he learned an application of Darwin’s theory of sur-
vival of the fittest, that societal development often ended in territorial ex-
pansion. He could thus envision a strategy by which the Chinese might
resist a Japa nese invasion. With remarkable foresight about Japa nese strategy
in the Sino- Japanese War, Jiang wrote that the Japa nese would naturally
come in via the coast, and they would capture the railroad network. If the
Chinese were to retreat inland and the Japa nese were to try to follow, their
supply lines would become long, and they would have to assign troops to
occupy Chinese towns, where they would be vulnerable to guerrilla- type
attacks. Jiang kept working on this plan until the Japa nese invaded in 1937.
Up until the trip to Eu rope with Liang Qichao, Jiang Baili had thought
of China’s prob lem in terms of a leadership crisis. Since the fall of the Qing,
Jiang Baili had been searching for the right leader for China, but all of them,
from Yuan Shikai through the warlords, were corrupt and self- serving. In
. 242 .
Po liti cal Disorder and the Road to War, 1911–1937
the classical Confucian sense, they lacked moral leadership, which made it
impossible to motivate their troops.
After analyzing Germany’s defeat in World War I, Jiang changed his
conclusions about China. He de cided that it was hopeless to depend on the
right leadership for China; no one on the po liti cal horizon was of the cal-
iber to acquire the “mandate of heaven.” But even without strong leadership,
the Chinese people could be awakened to resist and defend their country.
They could be more effective in resisting aggression than in attacking. The
prob lem, therefore, was not leadership but how to overcome the apathy and
ignorance of the Chinese public.
In a speech after he returned home, Jiang said, “In the past twenty years,
what we have seen and learned about strategy and tactics was all imported
from the jingoistic, aggressive countries, which contaminated us.” He went
on to say that self- defense was the wisdom the Chinese had inherited from
history, but in the short span of the first two de cades of the twentieth
century, this had been forgotten with the importing of offensive military tac-
tics that were not appropriate for China.1 Using his knowledge of the
strengths and weaknesses of the Japa nese military, Jiang Baili planned
the strategy for the 1932 battle in Shanghai, including temporarily moving
the capital from Nanjing to Luoyang. Thereafter, he and Chiang Kai- shek
patched up what had been a difficult relationship. Although Jiang died
suddenly in 1938, by then he had already played a key role in devising
China’s strategy to respond to a Japa nese invasion.
From Appeasement to the United Front
In a June 1934 speech to his troops, Chiang Kai- shek stated that the time
was not right to do battle with Japan. According to his figures, Japan had
3.3 million soldiers, its navy had 1.2 million tons of ships, and the air force
had 3,000 planes. Japan’s preparations for war with China were complete,
but Chiang realized that China was not prepared psychologically or mate-
rially to take on Japan. In October Chiang, thinly disguised under a pseud-
onym, wrote an article in which he asked whether Japan was China’s friend
or enemy. He noted that China had made a mistake by not negotiating with
Japan after the invasion of Manchuria, when there were still moderate voices
in Japan. As an example of proper timing, he noted that Lenin’s signing of
. 243 .
china and japan
the armistice with Germany in World War I had saved the Bolshevik
Revolution.
Many in China criticized Chiang’s article, including Hu Shi, who ob-
jected to the use of the word “friend” in any article related to Japan. Hu Shi
said the issue was how to make Japan less of an enemy, but talking about
Japan as a friend was out of the question.
At about the same time that Chiang Kai- shek wrote his article, Jiang
Baili was writing a series of essays, later compiled into a best- selling book
entitled One Foreigner’s Study of the Japa nese. He countered Chiang Kai- shek’s
argument by noting that it was impossible to negotiate with the Japa nese
because no one in Japan controlled both the army and the other parts of
the government.
Jiang Baili concluded that war between Japan and China was unavoid-
able, even though his friend and confidante, General Nagata Tetsuzan of
the Imperial Japa nese Army, maintained that China was not Japan’s enemy.
Jiang knew that for China it would be a war of re sis tance, entailing heavy
casualties and requiring the strength to endure humiliation. But with a
careful strategy, Jiang believed China could resist Japan and emerge as a vic-
torious unified country. He was less clear about how China could defeat
Japan, because the Japa nese had an apocalyptic, suicidal view of war. But
he was confident that Japan could not defeat China.
In 1935, just as Jiang’s articles began to appear, General Nagata Tetsuzan
was assassinated by Lieutenant Col o nel Aizawa Saburō. Aizawa slashed
Nagata to death with a military sword similar to the one that Jiang and
Nagata had each received from Emperor Meiji for being valedictorians of
their respective classes at the Imperial Japa nese Army Acad emy— the class
of 1904 for Nagata and the class of 1906 for Jiang. Japan had had many brutal
assassinations, but this one struck particularly close to home for Jiang. Na-
gata was a leader of the conservative Toseiha, or Control Faction, in the mili-
tary, and along with Ugaki, he had focused on modernizing the army. His
death was another sign of the re sis tance to modernization among midlevel
Japa nese officers and the broken chain of command in the Japa nese Army.
In the following year, on February 26, 1936, more than 1,400 soldiers led
an elaborate upri
sing in central Tokyo, attacking government offices and the
Asahi newspaper building. The rebels succeeded in assassinating five gov-
. 244 .
Po liti cal Disorder and the Road to War, 1911–1937
ernment officials, including Finance Minister Takahashi. As a coup, their
audacious act did not succeed, but it came perilously close. Moreover, it was
obvious that the group had been rehearsing maneuvers in downtown Tokyo
for several days, which meant that members of the Tokyo police had been
involved. This incident fi nally awakened Japan’s military leadership and the
emperor to the dangers of the radical ele ments in the army. For the first time,
punishments were handed down: seventeen of the ringleaders were tried
and hanged. In July 1936 Aizawa Saburō, who had killed Nagata Tetsuzan
the previous year, was also hanged. Ishiwara Kanji, the bold planner behind
the Manchurian Incident, believed that the February 26 attack on the gov-
ernment was fundamentally wrong and played a key role in getting the sol-
diers who had plotted the coup to turn themselves in. The leadership in
Japan that emerged after the February 26 attempted coup did not come from
among civilian politicians or bureaucrats but from the Toseiha.
In December 1936 Chiang Kai- shek went to Xi’an to meet with a group
of Guomin dang leaders. Subordinates of Zhang Xueliang kidnapped
Chiang in an effort to make him commit to join with the Communists in a
combined campaign to defeat Japan. After two weeks, Chiang fi nally capit-
ulated and agreed to join forces with the Communists to fight the Japa-
nese. Jiang Baili had been immediately summoned to Xi’an when word came
of Chiang’s kidnapping. He went as a member of Chiang Kai- shek’s staff,
but unlike Chiang, he strongly supported combining forces to resist the
Japa nese. In his strategy, this was a first, necessary step.
Chiang Kai- shek was a realist. He knew that he could not confront the
Japa nese north of the Yellow River; he would have to open a second front,
prob ably in Shanghai, as in 1932. The Japa nese would prob ably react with
an armada of ships and massive troops, as they had in 1932. Eventually the
Guomin dang could retreat as far as Sichuan province, beyond the reach of
the Japa nese, but also far from the industrial infrastructure. The Chinese
China and Japan Page 38
