Japan in the late twenties was
going through a period of depression and was planning a campaign of expansion
because the country was overcrowded and lacked natural resources for home and
for war. At this time China was in a
state of political unrest, ruled by local warlords. Chiang Kai-shek was trying to unite his country and endeavouring
to rule South China. At the time he had
a greater fear of the Communists than he had of the Japanese. In 1928 his Northern Expedition drove
Marshall Chang Tso-lin, a bandit turned warlord, north to the eastern provinces
known as Manchuria of which he was the Governor. He was returning to his capital, Mukden, from Peiping (Beijing)
when explosives blew up his train. Following his murder, the plan by the Kwantung Army was to seize the
city of Mukden and much of southern Manchuria, but it failed because the senior
officers did not support this attack. The Young Marshall, as Marshall Chang Hsueh-liang was known, succeeded
his father and became a very dominant person in the Chinese history of the
early 1930s. Chang Hsueh-liang was to
find out that this plot had been planned and executed by the Japanese, and for
this reason he hated the Japanese vehemently.
Three years later Chang, who was
Commander-in-Chief of the North Eastern Frontier Army, was to lose his eastern
provinces and Mukden to the Japanese. The Mukden Incident or the Manchurian Incident, as they knew it, was
orchestrated by Ishiwara Kanji. An
explosion, which was planned by the Japanese, occurred on the South Manchurian
Railway on September 18th 1931 and this occurrence was to herald
their attack on the Mukden garrison and the Young Marshall’s small air force
base. The Japanese had faked the
derailment on the railroad and this they coolly blamed on the Chinese and made
the excuse to invade Manchuria. Thus
the Young Marshall had further reason to hate the Japanese.
Having
briefly toyed with the option of direct negotiations with Japan, as was the
wish of Shidehara, Chiang Kai-shek concluded that he had no alternative, but to
appeal to the League of Nations because he was in no position to fight the
Japanese. Further to this, in January
1932, the Japanese engineered another incident, known as the Shanghai Incident.
Carefully orchestrated demonstrations hostile
to those Japanese living there were organised. To protect her nationals, Admiral Shiozawa sent in his
marines.