The Xi’an Incident: The Beginning of the End for Chiang Kai-shek

The opening shots of the Second World War are sometimes identified as those which ricocheted round the white marble parapets of a Sung Dynasty bridge near Beijing on the night of July 7th, 1937. Diplomatic and journalistic opinion in the West immediately dismissed the exchange (at the fancifully-named Marco Polo Bridge of Lukouchiou) as yet another example of the alarms and excursions which had punctuated the past seven years of deteriorating relations between China and Japan.

Japan's provocation of China had taken tragic and comic turns since the Imperial forces' first act of aggression in Manchuria. Lukouchiou was pure farce. Japanese forces had swept over the Great Wall to within sight of Beijing and they had developed a penchant for showing their strength – depicted in the world's press as shouting banzais to the rising sun.

The demonstration that July night 50 years ago was different, however. A Japanese force of three infantry regiments, supported by tanks, deployed near the bridge on night manoeuvres. From the other side of the span came a challenge from an officer of the Chinese 29th Army; to be answered by gunfire.

As dawn broke a Japanese column marched up to the walls of Wanping, the small garrison town overlooking the bridge and, laying the corpse of one of the soldiers before the gates, demanded entrance. The Chinese commander refused and conducted a heated argument with his Japanese counterpart while sitting in an armchair on the walls. Negotiations continued around the corpse after it had been lowered to the ground by ropes.

No one could decide, then or later, who had fired the first shot, but it did not matter. The Japanese had their casus belli. Within two days 10,000 Japanese troops were moving by foot and rail into Chinese territory.

Chiang Kai-shek had issued his last order, to the aforementioned chairborne officer, to 'avoid any kind of incident which might provoke the Japanese'. He now had to be Generalissimo in fact, as well as in name, in a war of national survival, the imminence of which he had arrogantly and myopically refused to recognise until only eight months before.

The confident image of Chiang throughout the Second World War, smiling from the posters as one of the 'Big Four' standard bearers of Democracy, was very different to the neurotic ditherer who throughout the 1930s showed resolution only in facing inwards and pursuing the spectre which had haunted him since his formative years in politics – rampant Communism. Chiang was only brought to a sense of reality by the most drastic measure – he was kidnapped by his own subordinates, at Xi'an in December 1936 in collaboration with the Communists, and held prisoner until he agreed (though not in writing) to an alliance of all Chinese political factions against the Japanese. China, towards the end of 1936, was losing face so badly in fact that foreign business interests, for whom it had represented extremely rich pickings since the Opium Wars, were openly speculating about the fall of 'this addled state'. The British charge d'affaires in Beijing wrote:

The Generalissimo thinks it is his military duty to reconquer the whole of China and Manchuria – it is clear that any scheme of American assistance to achieve such objectives would now be bankrupt before it got off the ground.

Chiang would never concede defeat and took his cause off into very comfortable exile, supported until recently by the American aid which came too late to save him on the mainland. Ironically, it was during last year's 120th birthday celebrations for Sun Yat-sen in Beijing that the Chinese government offered the hand of reconciliation to the separated brethren in Taiwan.

The Xi'an Incident, called by incredulous Westerners 'a theme fit for a new Gilbert', ran in fact be seen as the pivotal event of modern Chinese history. Before it there was a chance that the original party of the Chinese Revolution, the Kuomintang, would succeed in putting its stamp on China. Afterwards there was really none; Chiang's instincts in lunging for the Communists' jugular were correct but he had been mistaken in his timing. By the late 1930s the Left had captured the weather gauge in propaganda by its call for common fronts against Fascism. Xi'an was probably its most complete victory, for it allowed Mao Zedong to gain, and hold, the upper hand psychologically, and ultimately politically, over Chiang, his rival for the inheritance of Sun Yat-sen's revolution.