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.