The assassination of Zhang Zuolin

At 5.23 a.m. on 4 June 1928, a few kilometres from the station at Mukden, a powerful explosive charge went off at the crossing of two railway lines near Huanggutun station. A special train was passing at that moment, carrying Marshal Zhang Zuolin back from Beijing to Manchuria; he had ruled north-eastern China for twelve years and for a year had headed the internationally recognised government of the Republic of China. His saloon carriage was crushed and the railway bridge above the tracks collapsed. The governor of Heilongjiang province, Wu Junsheng, was killed on the spot. Zhang, gravely injured, died a few hours later at his residence. The attack was carried out neither by Chinese revolutionaries, as attempts were made to suggest, nor by “Japanese agents”, as is sometimes written, but by officers of the Japanese Kwantung Army, acting without orders from the government in Tokyo. The plan was drawn up by one of its senior staff officers, Colonel Daisaku Kōmoto. In Japan the affair was for years hidden under the official name of “a certain grave incident in Manchuria”. The Chinese call it the Huanggutun incident.

The ruler of Manchuria and his Japanese patrons

Zhang Zuolin began as the leader of a band of mounted bandits in southern Manchuria. During the Russo-Japanese War he worked for the Japanese, and afterwards, step by step, he took control of the three north-eastern provinces: Fengtian (today’s Liaoning), Jilin and Heilongjiang. The Japanese, who since the Treaty of Portsmouth had held the Kwantung Leased Territory in Manchuria, the South Manchuria Railway and troops to guard it, regarded him as the best guarantor of their interests. Zhang kept order, suppressed banditry and allowed investment, and at critical moments the Kwantung Army came to his aid, as in December 1925, when his general Guo Songling rebelled against him.

Zhang, however, wanted to rule the whole of China, not just Manchuria, and had no intention of being a Japanese puppet. He fought wars with other warlords for Beijing, and in June 1927 he proclaimed himself generalissimo and took charge of the Beijing government. The wars devoured the money of Manchuria, whose currency lost almost all its value. He also increasingly irritated the Japanese. He built Chinese railway lines parallel to the South Manchuria Railway, dragged his feet over granting promised concessions and sought support from the Americans and the British. Many Japanese officers in Manchuria considered him “ungrateful” and believed he should be replaced by someone more compliant.

The government in Tokyo took a different view. The Prime Minister, General Giichi Tanaka, had known Zhang since the war with Russia and believed he was still useful to Japan, though he ought not to be waging war in China proper. In the summer of 1927 Tanaka convened the so-called Eastern Conference in Tokyo, which resolved that Japan would defend its special position in Manchuria against anyone who threatened it. The so-called Tanaka Memorial, a supposed plan for world conquest said to have been presented to the Emperor at the time, which later circulated in Chinese and Soviet publications, is a forgery; but the fear of a united China reaching out for Manchuria was very real in Tokyo.

Retreat from Beijing

In the spring of 1928 the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek and his allies were closing in on Beijing. At the beginning of May there was a bloody clash at Jinan between the Japanese army and Chiang’s troops, but Chiang bypassed the city and pressed on northwards. The Japanese government feared that Zhang’s beaten armies would fall back into Manchuria and that the Nationalists would follow them, carrying the civil war into areas where Japan had its railways and troops. On 16 May Tanaka’s government decided that any army, Northern or Southern, that entered Manchuria in disorder would be disarmed, and informed both sides accordingly. The Japanese minister in Beijing, Kenkichi Yoshizawa, advised Zhang to return to Mukden before it was too late.

The Kwantung Army under General Chōtarō Muraoka had already prepared to move outside the railway zone to Jinzhou, where it was to disarm the retreating troops. It hoped in this way to take effective control of the whole of Manchuria. The imperial order, however, never came. Tanaka, fearing the reaction of the United States and the other powers, called off the operation at the last moment. Embittered officers decided they had to act on their own. According to later accounts General Muraoka considered removing Zhang, but Colonel Kōmoto took the matter over and organised the assassination himself. A few weeks before the attack he wrote to a friend in Tokyo that nothing would happen “if one or two Zhang Zuolins die like dogs”, and that “this time he would certainly do it”.

The attack

Zhang left Beijing early on the morning of 3 June on a special train of about twenty carriages. He travelled via Tianjin and Shanhaiguan on the Beijing–Mukden line, which was guarded by his own soldiers. The only place on the route they did not control lay just outside Mukden, where the Chinese line passed beneath a bridge carrying the Japanese South Manchuria Railway. There the ground belonged to the railway zone guarded by the Japanese.

Kōmoto entrusted the execution of the plan to Captain Kaneo Tōmiya, a company commander of the Japanese railway guard, and the charges were laid by sappers sent from Korea. According to various accounts, some 120 or even 300 kilograms of explosive were hidden in sacks on the bridge or right next to it. In case of failure a device to derail the train had been prepared, along with a detachment that was to attack Zhang’s carriage. To shift the blame onto the Nationalists, the Japanese lured several Chinese opium addicts to the vicinity of the site, paid them and killed them, planting documents on the bodies intended to show that they were Kuomintang agents. One of them escaped and told the whole story to the men of Zhang’s son.

Zhang spent the night in the saloon carriage that had once belonged to the Empress Dowager Cixi – according to some accounts playing mahjong – in the company of his generals and his Japanese adviser, Major Seiya Giga. Before Mukden Giga moved to another carriage and survived. As the train passed slowly under the bridge, the charge exploded. Several members of the marshal’s entourage were killed. Among the wounded was General Zhang Jinghui, later prime minister of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Zhang Zuolin, his head shattered, was taken to his residence in Mukden, where he died later the same day.

An attack that failed

The murder succeeded, but its political purpose did not. Kōmoto had counted on the chaos following the marshal’s death to provoke the Manchurian troops into fighting the Japanese, which would give the Kwantung Army a pretext to seize Mukden. The commanders of the Mukden army, however, kept their heads. Zhang’s death was kept secret, with the official announcement saying only that he had been wounded, and the Japanese units waiting on alert were stood down. The marshal’s eldest son, the 27-year-old Zhang Xueliang, commander of one of the armies, made his way to Mukden in disguise. Only once he had taken command, on 21 June, was Zhang Zuolin’s death announced.

A joint investigation by the Japanese and Mukden authorities officially established nothing, but the truth soon came out. Chinese investigators pointed out that wires led from the site of the explosion to a Japanese guard post, and in Tokyo opposition members of parliament and Japanese diplomats in Mukden said from the outset that the army had done it. Zhang Xueliang knew who had killed his father. The Japanese hoped that he would be obedient, or that power would pass to General Yang Yuting, who was well disposed towards them. Instead the young marshal opened talks with Nanjing, even though Tanaka warned him against it through a special envoy. On 29 December 1928 the flags of the Republic of China bearing the Kuomintang emblem were hoisted over the buildings of Mukden. Manchuria recognised the authority of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, and China was, for the first time in more than a decade, at least formally united. On 10 January 1929 Zhang Xueliang had Yang Yuting and his associate Chang Yinhuai shot. An assassination meant to weaken Chinese authority in Manchuria had achieved the opposite.

The cover-up

Once he had made sure that the perpetrators were Japanese officers, Prime Minister Tanaka promised Emperor Hirohito in December 1928 that those responsible would face a court martial. He met resistance, however, from the army, from his own ministers and from politicians who argued that revealing the truth would damage Japan internationally. According to some accounts Kōmoto threatened to tell the court about all the army’s conspiracies. The affair was closed with disciplinary penalties: Kōmoto was suspended from duty, General Muraoka was placed on the retired list and several officers were reprimanded. The last of the genrō, Prince Kinmochi Saionji, had been pressing since the autumn of 1928 for the culprits to be punished. When on 27 June 1929 Tanaka presented the Emperor with an outcome that no longer mentioned the army’s involvement in the attack, Hirohito, backed by the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Nobuaki Makino, reproached him for saying something different from before and made it clear that he did not wish to hear any more from him. On 2 July 1929 Tanaka’s government resigned.

Historians disagree as to whether the Emperor genuinely wanted the culprits punished or was rather irritated by the Prime Minister’s inconsistency. What is certain is that no one stood trial, and the Japanese public did not learn the truth until the Tokyo trial after the Second World War, where General Ryūkichi Tanaka testified about it. Hirohito himself recalled after the war that the affair had taught him not to oppose the government’s decisions. His critics reply that this explanation conveniently relieved him of responsibility for the years that followed.

The long shadow of Huanggutun

The assassination of Zhang Zuolin was a dress rehearsal for what happened three years later. The officers of the Kwantung Army had learned that they could kill the head of a foreign state, blame the Chinese and go unpunished. They also drew lessons from their failure. When on 18 September 1931 Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara arranged an explosion on the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden, the army no longer waited for Tokyo’s consent but attacked at once, and within a few months it had occupied the whole of Manchuria. The Mukden incident led to Manchukuo, to Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and onto the road that, through the war with China in 1937, took Japan to war with America and Britain.

His father’s death made Zhang Xueliang an enemy of Japan, and his move to Nanjing’s side turned Manchuria into a cause for the whole of China. In 1931, however, he withdrew his troops from Manchuria almost without a fight, and in 1936, during the Xi’an incident, he detained Chiang Kai-shek and forced him to come to terms with the Communists against Japan. The impunity of the killers of 1928, the cover-up of the crime by the army and the court, and the fall of the government that had tried to punish it foreshadowed the end of civilian control over the army in 1930s Japan.