Season 15, Episode 3: The Frame-up
When we last left our friends in China, their warlord era was just coming to an end when Chiang Kai-shek defeated the forces of Wu Peifu and many of his other rival warlords and seized control of Beijing in 1928. During that bonus episode from the previous season, we focused primarily on the activities of various Chinese armies, politicians, commanders, and other leaders while saying very little about their Japanese counterparts. We begin today by backtracking, just a little, in order to better follow the developments in Northeast China in the region often referred to as Manchuria.
When the Japanese took over the Russian lease on the Liaodong Peninsula, called the Kwantung Leased Territory, after the Russo-Japanese War, they stationed a modest garrison of 14,000 troops in the area. Called the “Kwantung Garrison,” they were directly accountable to the Governor-General of the territory, a position which was accountable to the prime minister and civilian government. In 1919, however, the Kwantung government was reorganized and split into civilian and military sectors, each with its own respective leader. The General in charge of the Kwantung army did not answer to civilian authorities, but to his superiors in the Imperial Japanese Army.
Throughout the 20s and 30s, the officer corps of the Imperial Japanese Army were becoming more politically active and, in many cases, became radicalized. As you may recall from my discussion with author Quin Cho at the beginning of this season, around thirty percent of the officers in the Imperial Army were from rural households. Many of those households relied on silk production as a means of income and when the Great Depression struck, Japanese silk exports plummeted. With the demand for their product gone practically overnight, many rural families were forced to take drastic measures in order to make a living, sometimes even resorting to selling some of their children to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the Japanese government’s response of returning to the gold standard and slashing public spending served only to deliver a devastating one-two punch to Japan’s working class.
Meanwhile, in China, Chiang Kai-shek had a plan to consolidate his authority over Beijing and, by extension, the entire nation. While the Kuomintang, KMT for short, had relied on the support of the Chinese Communist Party during the Northern Expedition, once it became clear that the expedition was working, they decided it was time to part ways. KMT had evolved, by this point, into a primarily nationalist party whose upper leadership was broadly hostile to communism and leftism in general. What came to be called the White Terror began in Shanghai on April 12 1927.
The many labor unions and leftist organizations within Shanghai had successfully staged an armed uprising and overthrew the ruling Zhili clique in late March, just before Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army, or NRA, entered the area. While this eased the NRA’s efforts at displacing the Zhili clique and taking over the city, Chiang Kai-shek and other top KMT leaders were uneasy with the effectiveness of the communist resistance in Shanghai. In early April, KMT leadership decided that communists had to be purged from their party and measures taken to ensure that such an effective armed uprising could not be staged against the KMT afterward.
Chiang Kai-shek declared martial law in Shanghai, followed by mass arrests of known communists and orders to disarm existing communist militias. Many of those militias decided they would rather not be disarmed and fought back, though the KMT nationalists generally triumphed in those small-scale engagements. Those arrested were given swift summary executions, usually beheadings, and the corpses of the female victims of this White Terror were mutilated and put on display to inspire cooperation among the populace.
The results of this “mask-off” moment for the KMT were far-reaching and extremely consequential. It marked the end of Soviet support for the KMT, as well as some turnover in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, as those who had encouraged cooperation with the KMT were now replaced with counterparts who were more militant-minded. As the White Terror spread across the nation in every place where the KMT held power, death and destruction followed. It is estimated that this terror, which would stretch on in fits and starts for years, killed around one million Chinese peasants, and the ensuing civil war would push that casualty count much higher.
Throughout the National Revolutionary Army were a smattering of higher officers who held communist sympathies but had wisely kept these sympathies a secret. Now that the KMT had adopted a violent anti-communist policy, many of these officers leapt into action to try and topple the newly-ascendant Chiang Kai-shek and his underlings. In August of 1927, a communist army seized Nanchang in what came to be called the Nanchang Uprising. The KMT was swift to respond, however, and the communists were soon driven from the city after a violent siege. Of the 20,000 soldiers in that army, only around one thousand survived by seeking shelter in the Jinggang Mountains in nearby Jiangxi Province. They would not be the only communist army to seek shelter in that massive mountain range.
In Hunan Province, a peasant and worker army was formed under the leadership of a man known as Mao Zedong. With assistance from Li Zhen, who thereafter became the first female general of the People’s Liberation Army, Hunan province fell into revolt as Mao and his followers seized power and formed a workers’ council style government, officially established as the “Hunan Soviet.” Within two months, however, a KMT-led army showed up and drove the communists out. Like their fellows in Nanchang, they fled to the Jinggang Mountains in Jiangxi Province where they reorganized and, for the moment, rested to restore their strength.
Leaders of the CCP decided to take this moment and reassess their tactics and ask some hard questions. The KMT, at this point, was clearly stronger in pure military terms than the CCP. They were better supplied, better trained, better armed, and better organized. Mao Zedong advocated for a shift away from set-piece battles, which the communists excelled at losing, toward guerrilla tactics by which a disadvantaged force might eventually defeat a superior enemy. However, the KMT was hardly idle during this period and, in addition to continuing a White Terror across the nation in which workers, peasants, women with short hair, and other suspected communists were being extrajudicially murdered, they also organized a massive encirclement campaign. The objective of this new effort was to completely surround the communist army which was now ensconced in the Jinggang Mountains and other scattered fortified locations nationwide, and kill every last one of them.
However, this was a massive effort which Chiang Kai-shek knew would not see ultimate success for several years. In the meantime, Beijing was still not under KMT control, as Zhang Zuolin and his Fengtian Clique had seized power there in 1926. As we discussed last season, Zhang Zuolin was a client of the Empire of Japan and owed a measurable amount of his authority over northeast China to the Japanese government’s support. The Imperial Japanese Army was not happy that he had taken Beijing and seemed to be increasingly involving himself in the affairs of China proper. They preferred that he rule his virtual fiefdom of Manchuria and continue supplying them with raw materials and bolstering their now-faltering economy with a continuation of their exclusive trade agreement.
While Zhang Zuolin knew that the Japanese were only using him for their own ends, he had no intention of playing their puppet forever. After being driven from Beijing by the National Revolutionary Army under the KMT in 1928, he returned to his seat of power in northeast China and schemed a way to gather enough resources to take Beijing back. Opening the region to free trade was a good way to generate revenue and while he knew the Japanese wouldn’t like it, he probably believed that they would get over it and trust that he would make it up to them some other way. Instead, they blew up his train and killed him.
A month prior to that train bombing, full scale war nearly erupted between Japan and China. The trouble began in Shandong Province, in the city of Jinan. Last season, we discussed how the Empire of Japan was forced to give Qingdao, which they had taken from the German Empire, back to China in the aftermath of the first World War. Although the empire no longer had direct control over Shandong Province, they claimed to have special interests there and considered it part of their sphere of influence. Many Japanese people lived in Shandong, particularly business leaders who managed the railroads and other economic infrastructure projects throughout the province.
Because of the ever-present danger of the ongoing wars in China, the question of how best to protect Japanese citizens abroad was a pressing one. The previous cabinet’s minister of foreign affairs pursued a policy of evacuation for endangered citizens. However, Tanaka Giichi reversed course on this issue, choosing instead to deploy troops to protect Japanese citizens in China when he deemed it necessary. The city of Jinan hosted many Japanese soldiers who regularly patrolled the city for the express purpose of protecting Japanese expatriates.
At the heart of the conflict which followed was the infamous 21 Demands which Japan had attempted to force upon China near the beginning of the first world war. You may recall that after international outrage at Japan’s opportunistic power grab, China did indeed agree to some of the conditions which Japan demanded. However, now that national reunification appeared to be growing closer, the government in Beijing had begun pushing back against the demands which they had previously agreed to, arguing that their previous acquiescence was invalid because it was coerced by military threats from Japan. One of the contested conditions was extra-territorial protection for Japanese citizens, which placed said citizens outside of Chinese legal jurisdiction even when they were on Chinese soil.
It’s difficult to be certain of how the Jinan incident began. Multiple conflicting stories from both Chinese and Japanese accounts paint very different pictures regarding who shot first and why. Whatever the truth, shots were indeed exchanged between Japanese and Chinese troops in Jinan, possibly because said Chinese troops were assaulting a Japanese newspaper proprietor but also possibly because Japanese troops opened fire on a Chinese soldier after a verbal altercation. Things escalated quickly and the city was transformed into a battleground between Japanese and Chinese troops. At one point some Japanese soldiers killed a Chinese diplomat, which they claimed was a simple mistake. However, some Chinese accounts claim that the diplomat was targeted and that Japanese troops mutilated his face before executing him in cold blood.
In purely military terms, there is no question that the Japanese were the clear victors in the fighting that ensued after the Jinan Incident. Eight days after the fighting began, the last Chinese soldiers in the vicinity were in full retreat and the city was occupied by Japanese troops. No matter how much the Imperial Japanese Army leadership wanted a war with China, however, Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi was not happy with how things had proceeded. Although it had been his policy of protection which had arguably sparked this moment, he was still trying to get the Japanese economy back on track and this included reducing military spending, something he could not do if Japan was at war.
In the year of negotiations that followed, eventually the Prime Minister and Chiang Kai-shek accepted shared responsibility for the incident. A month after the Jinan Incident, several lower-ranking officers in the Kwantung Army tried to spark a war against the Chinese by blowing up a train car with Zhang Zuolin inside.
We discussed the assassination of Zhang Zuolin last season, but we did not discuss the Kwantung Army officers’ larger objective in killing him. In a truly innovative spirit of efficiency, they tried to stage the incident as a false flag attack, framing a few Chinese nationals for the killing which would justify a military response. The larger issue motivating these disgruntled Japanese soldiers was fear that the National Revolutionary Army was about to triumph and that the Soviet Union might sponsor the communist element therein to support Manchurian separatism, which would inevitably lead to Soviet troops occupying the same corner of northeast China in which the Kwantung Army now resided. In such a position, Russia could more easily avenge their former defeat at the hands of the Japanese.
Wanting to expand the Empire of Japan while also preventing theoretical Soviet incursion, they abducted three Chinese morphine addicts and prepared various false documents which were meant to be secret communiques from KMT leadership ordering Zhang Zuolin’s assassination and other incriminating intelligence. One of the addicts managed to escape but the other two were stabbed to death with bayonets, after which the documents and illicit weaponry was planted on their corpses. However, this plan had a few holes in it which would ultimately cause its undoing.
The first problem for this story was the escaped morphine addict. He sought shelter with a Chinese garrison and told them everything he had seen. Then there was the problem of the secret KMT communiques - whoever actually wrote them used the Japanese version of kanji pictograms in places which would make sense in Japanese but would not be the choice of a native Chinese scribe. There is a larger linguistic explanation, but this is the gist.
Then there was the problem of authority. The assassination and false flag plot had been conceived and carried out by a cadre of mid-ranking officers whose superiors knew nothing of their plans. As a result, the Kwantung Army itself was not in a position to mobilize quickly to take advantage of the chaos that ensued in the wake of Zhang Zuolin’s death. Making matters even more difficult for the plotters, the Fengtian army did not react the way that they were expecting.
While rumors swirled in the immediate aftermath of the train bombing, the Fengtian army kept Zhang Zuolin’s death a secret for two weeks. Prior to this incident, the Kwantung army leadership had been wining and dining Yang Yuting, a high-ranking Fengtian general whom they expected would succeed in the case of Zhang Zuolin’s death. However, the Fengtian army instead rallied unexpectedly behind Zhang Zuolin’s son, Zhang Xueliang, as their new warlord-in-chief. This became even more problematic when Zhang Xueliang, in his capacity as the generalissimo of the Fengtian army, pledged allegiance to Chiang Kai-shek, thus politically reuniting Manchuria with China proper.
In short, the assassination of Zhang Zuolin did not give the Kwantung Army a just cause for making war on China nor did it make them more able to expand their influence throughout Manchuria. The officers involved in this plot soon feared that they would be brought to account for their reckless failure, but those fears would prove unfounded.
Prime Minister Tanaka Giishi was furious at the rogue action and recommended to the military that those responsible should be tried in a public court martial. The emperor agreed but did not get involved directly, instead choosing to pressure the premier to get it done. However, the Imperial Army’s top brass offered some convincing counter-arguments. While Zhang Xueliang was not friendly to the Kwantung Army, he also refused, on advice from Chiang Kai-shek, to give his father’s assassination more than a cursory investigation, nor did he demand the expulsion of Japanese troops from northeast China. The general public did not know with any certainty who was responsible for the assassination, and trying these officers in a public court martial would only cause national embarrassment for Japan. Thus the military refused the prime minister’s request and proceeded to do their best to cover the incident up. There was little doubt, among geo-political spectators, that some Japanese faction was responsible for the murder of Zhang Zuolin, but the parties directly involved - China and Japan - both opted for the convenient approach of looking the other way.
The incident was widely condemned by the international community but without evidence or even motivation to uncover the truth, the assassination of Zhang Zuolin went unpunished and gradually faded away from the latest press cycle. Being far too busy carrying out mass murder against labor organizers, women with short haircuts, and peasant farmers, Chiang Kai-shek had no desire to make war against Japan. The possibility of such a war was so alarming to him that he ordered Zhang Xueliang to back down any time he or his Fengtian army was confronted by the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek’s diary of the time indicates that he wanted revenge against the Japanese for the Jinan Incident and the myriad other humiliations but recognized that China would almost certainly lose a war against Japan. Revenge would have to wait.
As for the Kwantung Army, their members had not given up the idea of a false flag attack which would justify the Imperial Japanese Army seizing control of northeast China and building the pan-Asian empire which they believed would make their nation into a true leading world power. Next time, we will examine the radicalization of the officer corps in the Kwantung Army and the Imperial Japanese Army more broadly as they stage another false flag attack, this time with far greater success.