Mukden Incident

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Template:Campaignbox Second Sino-Japanese War

The Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931, also called the Manchurian Incident, occurred in southern Manchuria when a section of railroad, owned by Japan's South Manchuria Railway, near Mukden (today's Shenyang) was blown up. Japan's military accused Chinese dissidents of the act, thus providing an excuse for the Japanese annexation of Manchuria. It has sometimes been compared to the burning of the Reichstag in Germany. In Chinese, this incident is referred to as the 9.18 Incident or Liutiaogou Incident (Chinese:柳條溝事變).

1 Background
2 The Incident
3 Invasion
4 Aftermath
5 Controversy
6 Others
7 Popular culture
8 See also
9 External links

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Background

After the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Japan had replaced Russia as the dominant foreign power in Manchuria. Japan's China policy was conflicting throughout the 1930s. Japanese military in Manchuria and North China enjoyed some degree of independence from both the civilian government and the military authority in Tokyo. There were debates as to whether Japan should attempt to conquer and establish a sort of colonial relationship with China, or whether Japan should strengthen economic relations with China to make both countries more dependent on each other, thus making armed conflicts between the two less likely. Furthermore, the Japanese government wished to see China more fragmented because dealing with separate Chinese factions, which were often conflicting against each other, was easier and more beneficial to Japan. For example, Japan intervened the Northern Expedition in the 1928 Jinan Incident to prevent the unification of China. On the other hand, Chinese policy during that time followed first internal pacification, then external resistance and seemed to be appeasing to the Japanese as the Kuomintang Nationalist Government was mired in a continuous campaign against the Chinese Communists and just recently fought and won the 1930 war against remnant warlords. Chinese foreign policy during this period followed the doctrine of nonresistance (Template:Zh-tp). Aggressive policy by the relatively independent Japanese military authority in China, coupled with the policy of nonresistance by the Chinese central government, became the main impetus toward the Mukden Incident.

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The Incident

The aim of Japanese junior officers in Manchuria was to provide a pretext that would justify Japanese military invasion and replace the Chinese government in the region with a Japanese or a puppet one. They chose to sabotage a railway section in an area near Liutiao Lake (Template:Zh-t). The fact was that the area had no official name and was not militarily important to either the Japanese or the Chinese. But it was only eight hundred meters away from the Chinese garrison of Beidaying (Template:Zh-t), which was stationed by troops under the command of the young marshall Zhang Xueliang. The plan was to attract Chinese troops with the explosion and then blame it on them to provide a pretext for a formal Japanese invasion. Also, to make the sabotage more convincing as a calculated Chinese attack on an essential transportation target, thereby masking Japanese action as a legitimate measure to protect a vital railway of industrial and economic importance, the Japanese press labeled the site Liutiaogou (Template:Zh-t) or Liutiaoqiao (Template:Zh-t), which meant "ditch" and "bridge", respectively, when in reality the site was just a small railway section laid on a piece of flat land. The choice to place the explosives at this site was to prevent extensive reconstruction had the site been a railway bridge.

Colonel Itagaki Seishiro and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara planned the incident in which officers of the Shimamoto Regiment, which guarded the South Manchuria Railway, arranged for sappers to place explosives beneath the tracks. At around 10:20PM (22:20), September 18, the explosives were detonated. However, the explosion was minor and only a 1.5 meter section on one side of the rail was damaged. In fact, a train from Changchun passed by the site without much problem and arrived at Shenyang at 10:30PM (22:30).

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Invasion

Image:Mukden 1931 rail.jpg

After the explosion, the Japanese immediately framed the Chinese soldiers garrisoned nearby and attacked those troops under the justification that Japanese property must be protected from assaults by the Chinese. Immediately, five hundred Japanese troops attacked the Chinese garrison of around seven thousand at Beidaying. Zhang Xueliang, under implicit approval from Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Government, had already urged his men to not put any fight and store away any weapons in case the Japanese invaded. Therefore, the Japanese met with no resistance at Beidaying, and on September 19 proceeded to totally occupy the garrison and major cities of Mukden (Shenyang), Changchun, Antung (today Dandong), and the surrounding areas. Whenever fighting broke out, it was usually due to miscommunication between the central government and the Chinese troops who were supposed to have been ordered to be nonresistant. Within a few days all three northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning (where Mukden was), fell under Japanese control.

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Aftermath

Image:Mukden 1931 japan shenyang.jpg

Chinese public opinion strongly criticized Zhang Xueliang for his decision of nonresistance, even though the central government was indirectly responsible for this policy. Many had charged that Zhang's Northeastern Army of nearly a quarter million could have taken on the Kwantung Army of 11,000, and that giving up the three provinces without a fight was a great shame to the Chinese people. In addition, Zhang's arsenal in Manchuria was considered the most modern in China and that his troops had a few tanks, around sixty planes, four thousand machine guns, and a couple artillery battalions.

However, in reality, Zhang's seemingly superior force was undermined by several factors. One was that the Kwantung Army had a strong reserve force that could be transported by railway from Korea, which was a Japanese colony, directly to Manchuria. Secondly, more than half of Zhang's troops were stationed south of the Great Wall in the Hebei province, therefore they could not have been deployed fast enough to fight the Japanese north of the wall. Also, Zhang's troops were undertrained and poorly led compared to their Japanese counterparts. And the most important of all, Japanese agents permeated Zhang's command because of his previous (and his father Zhang Zuolin's) reliance on Japanese military advisors on equipping the originally warlord Northeastern Army. The Japanese knew the Northeastern Army inside-out and was able to conduct operations with much ease. For example, the Japanese detained Zhang's pilots on the night of the incident, rendering the airplanes useless without pilots.

The Chinese government did not resist because it was preoccupied with internal problems, including the newly independent Guangzhou government of Hu Hanmin, Communist insurrections, and terrible flooding of the Yangtze that created tens of thousands of refugees that needed help. In addition, Zhang Xueliang was in a hospital in Beijing, to raise money for the flood victims. However, in the press, Zhang was ridiculed as General Nonresistance.

Because of these circumstances, the central government was unable to do much about the situation, and relied on the international community for a peaceful resolution. The Chinese foreign embassy issued a strong protest to the Japanese government and called for the immediate stop of Japanese operations in Manchuria, and appealed to the League of Nations, on September 19. On October 24, the League of Nations passed a resolution mandating the withdrawal of Japanese troops, to be completed by November 16. However, Japan rejected the League of Nations mandate and insisted on direct negotiations with the Chinese government.

Negotiations went on intermittently without much result. On November 20 a conference in the Chinese government was convened, but the Guangzhou faction of the Kuomintang insisted that Chiang Kai-shek step down for the Manchurian debacle. On December 15, Chiang stepped down as the Chairman of the Nationalist Government and the Premier of the Republic of China (head of the Executive Yuan). Sun Ke, son of Sun Yat-sen, became the Premier and vowed to defend Jinzhou, another city of Liaoning, which was lost in early January 1932. As a result, Wang Jingwei then replaced Sun Ke as the Premier.

On January 7, the United States Secretary General Henry Stimson proclaimed that the United States would not recognize any government that was established as the result of Japanese actions in Manchuria. On January 14, the League of Nations commission, headed by the Second Earl of Lytton of Britain, arrived in Shanghai to examine the situation. In March, the puppet state of Manchukuo was established, with the last emperor of China, Puyi, installed as its head of state. On October 2, the Lytton Report was published and rejected the Japanese claim that the Mukden Incident was an act of self-defense. The report also ascertained that Manchukuo was the product of Japanese military aggression in China, while recognizing that Japan had legitimate concerns in Manchuria because of its economic ties there. The League refused to acknowledge Manchukuo as an independent nation. This caused Japan to resign from the League of Nations in March 1933.

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Controversy

Different opinions still exist as to who blew up the Japanese railroad at Mukden. One view is that it was Chinese dissidents, another that it was the Japanese military and there is also the view that this cannot be known due to a lack of historical evidence.

The 9.18 Incident Exhibition Museum at Shenyang, opened by the People's Republic of China, take the position that the explosives were planted by Japan. Yasukuni Shrine Yushukan Museum, which neighbors Yasukuni Shrine in Japan, places the blame on Chinese militias.

However, strong evidence actually points to Japan's Kwantung Army as conspiring to cause the blast. While most members of the Japanese military have denied planting the bomb, Major Hanaya (花谷正) of the army has confessed that the bomb was planted and the incident staged by them. Regardless of the origin of the bomb, the Japanese Kwantung Army accomplished their goal of the invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo.

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Others

Some anti-Japanese proponents of Chinese nationalism have pushed for the government of the People's Republic of China to designate September 18 as National Humiliation Day. The PRC government also opened the 9.18 Incident Exhibition Museum at Shenyang (present-day name of Mukden) on September 18, 1991. Then Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto was one of the notable visitors of the museum in 1997.

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