Jinan Incident

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Template:NPOV The Jinan Incident (Japanese:済南事件) or May 3rd Incident (Traditional Chinese: 五三慘案 , Simplified Chinese: 五三惨案), or Tsinan Incident, was an armed conflict between the Japanese Army and the Kuomintang's southern army in Jinan, the capital of Shandong in 1928 during the Kuomintang's Northern Expedition.

Mindful of the damage done to his foreign relations by the outrages committed by his troops in the course of the Nanjing Incident of March 1927, Chiang Kai-shek sought to avoid any repetition. In November 1927 he met with Tanaka Giichi, who had become Japan's premier on the fall of Wakatsuki Reijiro's Government in April of that year. (Tanaka acted as his own Foreign Minister.) But while Tanaka was nominal head of the Japan's government and a powerful general himself, events were to show that he could exert little control over the Japanese Army. Nor was Chiang's grip on his own forces firm.

Tanaka had won election, in part, on the strength of promises to take more active and aggressive measures than his predecessor toward protection of Japanese lives, property, and economic interests in China. Thus he could not be seen to be exhibiting the "weakness" he had accused his predecessors of.

Chiang, for his part, had only a tenuous hold on power in China and relied in large measure on revolutionary anti-foreign fervor to buttress his legitimacy. He too could not afford a "soft" policy.

Tanaka and Chiang were both anxious to keep their troops away from Jinan, where the risks of a clash were high, but were unable to. With no guarantee that Chinese forces would bypass Jinan, a combination of prior political commitments and Army insistence forced Tanaka to reinforce Japanese forces in the Shandong leased territory. Both the northern warlord coalition government in Beijing (Peking) and the Kuomintang government in Nanjing (Nanking) protested vigorously that this was a violation of China's sovereignty.

Contrary to his orders, the commander of the Japanese division sent to reinforce the territory, General Fukuda Hikosuke, moved his troops from Qingdao (Tsingtao) to Jinan. Northern Chinese troops withdrew from the city on 30 April 1928 and Kuomintang troops, contrary to orders, moved in. Matters remained tense but reasonably quiet and amicable until a minor clash occurred near the home of a Japanese family on 3 May. (There is no clear evidence as to how it started.) With both sides lacking good communications and control systems, fighting quickly spread among elements in contact throughout the city. Sporadic fighting persisted until Chiang and Fukuda arranged a truce on 5 May, and some shooting continued as Chiang's forces withdrew over the following two days, leaving a small force to maintain order in the city.

Chiang wanted nothing more than to get on with his move against the northerners. The Japanese diplomatic officials and home government wanted to get back to business. But, having received reinforcements and supplies, the Japanese commanders on 7 May presented a series of impossible demands with a very short deadline. Chiang tried to mollify the Japanese officers, but they attacked anyway and by 11 May had pushed the Chinese troops from the area.

For more than six months, Japanese troops terrorized Chinese in Jinan, executing many as suspected Kuomintang sympathizers up to 10,000 innocent citizens. All efforts by Tanaka and Chiang to establish more positive relationships were sabotaged by Japanese Army commanders. Many and perhaps all of them seem to have been animated by notions of military glory and honor more than any intention of extending Japanese rule in China, but their actions set the course for 17 years of intermittent bloody conflict. It was really at Jinan, even more than in the later Manchurian Incident, that the turn toward war began.

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