The end of the fighting in Manchuria

Popular war chronologies state that on 27 February 1932 the Sino-Japanese fighting in Manchuria came to an end and the whole region passed under Japanese control. No armistice or surrender was signed that day, however. The date comes from English-language studies according to which on 27 February General Ding Chao, the last commander of regular Chinese troops to resist the Japanese in the north, offered to cease fighting. Chinese and Japanese sources do not confirm this. They agree, however, that after the fall of Harbin at the beginning of February Chinese troops no longer defended any sizeable city, and that within five months the Japanese Kwantung Army had occupied the three provinces of north-eastern China. The end of February 1932 thus closes the phase of major operations that began near Mukden on the night of 18 September 1931. It does not close the war in Manchuria, which continued in another form for years to come.

Five months of conquest

In the first days of the invasion the Japanese seized Mukden (Shenyang), Changchun, Jilin and the entire zone of the South Manchuria Railway. Resistance was slight. The ruler of Manchuria, Marshal Zhang Xueliang, was in Beijing, and the best part of his Northeastern Army was stationed south of the Great Wall. Zhang and Chiang Kai-shek’s government ordered that no resistance be offered and placed their trust in the League of Nations. Some Chinese commanders and officials went over to the Japanese, among them General Xi Qia in Jilin.

In the north, in Heilongjiang province, things were different. General Ma Zhanshan, the acting governor, defied the ban on fighting and at the beginning of November 1931 defended the bridge over the Nen River. Although on 19 November he had to give up the provincial capital, Qiqihar, he became a national hero in China. In the south the Japanese advanced on Jinzhou, the last seat of Zhang Xueliang’s authorities in Manchuria. Zhang withdrew his units behind the Great Wall, and on 3 January 1932 the Japanese entered the city without a fight. Four days later the United States proclaimed the Stimson Doctrine, announcing that it would not recognise any changes brought about by force.

The battle for Harbin

The last large city outside Japanese control was Harbin, the hub of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which China and the Soviet Union managed jointly. For a long time the Japanese kept away from it, not wishing to provoke Moscow. The head of Japanese military intelligence in Harbin, Colonel Kenji Doihara, tried to take the city through collaborators. At the end of January he sent Xi Qia’s forces against it, but their way was barred by the Jilin Self-Defence Army, formed by Generals Ding Chao and Li Du from railway guard units and volunteers. On 26 January there was a battle near Shuangcheng in which Xi Qia’s troops were defeated. Riots broke out in Harbin in which several Japanese and Koreans were killed, giving the Kwantung Army a pretext to intervene. In those same days, on 28 January, Japanese naval infantry attacked Shanghai.

General Jirō Tamon’s 2nd Division set out to the rescue. For several days the Japanese forced their way by rail and on foot across the frozen plain in temperatures as low as thirty degrees below zero. On 4 February they reached the city. The defenders, largely poorly armed volunteers, fought for more than ten hours under artillery fire and air attack, and then withdrew north-east, down the Sungari. On 5 February (6 February according to some Chinese sources) the Japanese took Harbin. The Red Army did not react.

Politics instead of war

After the fall of Harbin the Kwantung Army turned back to politics. Doihara had been negotiating with Ma Zhanshan for weeks, and after Ding Chao’s defeat Ma agreed on 14 February to cooperate, in return for the governorship of Heilongjiang and, according to later accounts, a very large sum of money. On 16 February, in Mukden, under the eye of the Kwantung Army commander, General Shigeru Honjō, Ma, Xi Qia, Zang Shiyi of Liaoning and Zhang Jinghui of Heilongjiang met. They formed the Northeastern Administrative Committee under Zhang Jinghui’s chairmanship, which on 18 February announced that the north-eastern provinces were severing all ties with the government in Nanjing and becoming fully independent. On 29 February an assembly of representatives in Mukden asked the former Emperor of China, Puyi, to become head of the new state. Japanese officers, above all Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, had been preparing it for months.

Ding Chao and Li Du did not surrender. Their units withdrew to Binxian and Yilan on the lower Sungari and became the nucleus of armed resistance in the northern part of Jilin province. From March to June 1932 the Japanese waged a separate campaign against them. In the autumn Ding Chao took part in an unsuccessful attempt to retake Harbin, and then took refuge in the Soviet Union. He returned in 1933, was captured and entered the service of Manchukuo, the state he had previously fought.

A war that did not end

When Manchukuo was proclaimed on 1 March 1932, it seemed that Japan had achieved its aim almost without loss. The Kwantung Army, which in September had numbered about ten thousand men and, after reinforcements from Korea and Japan, about sixty thousand in December, had taken control of an area more than twice the size of the Japanese home islands, with some thirty million inhabitants, coal mines, steelworks and the best farmland in East Asia. Many Chinese units, however, had not been destroyed but merely dispersed, and their soldiers – together with peasants, members of traditional brotherhoods such as the Big Swords Society, and ordinary bandits – swelled the ranks of the so-called volunteer armies.

The first of these were formed even before the fighting for the cities had died down. On 8 February 1932 a former battalion commander, Wang Delin, founded the Chinese People’s National Salvation Army in eastern Jilin, and on 20 February he recaptured the town of Dunhua. In April Ma Zhanshan, who a few weeks earlier had become Manchukuo’s Minister of War, led his troops out of Qiqihar, proclaimed the restoration of the Chinese provincial government at Heihe and took up arms again, taking Japanese money and weapons with him. In the summer of 1932 the volunteer armies numbered, according to various estimates, anywhere from over a hundred thousand to as many as three hundred thousand men, though they were poorly armed and scattered. The Japanese called them all bandits and the fight against them “pacification” operations. By the end of 1932 and in 1933 they had broken up the largest concentrations, and Ma, Su Bingwen and Li Du crossed into the USSR with the remnants of their forces. Smaller units, and later Communist-led guerrillas, fought on in the mountains and forests of Manchuria until the end of the 1930s. The campaign against them brought mass repression of the civilian population.

Significance

The speed and ease of the conquest of Manchuria had far-reaching consequences. The Kwantung Army officers who had started the war without the government’s consent became heroes rather than defendants, which taught the Japanese military that acting on its own initiative paid off. The operations that followed – in Shanghai in 1932, in Rehe province in 1933 and in northern China in the years after – brought ever closer the open war with China that broke out in July 1937. In Japan victory aroused enthusiasm for war, and Manchuria came to be regarded as the empire’s “lifeline”, from which there could be no withdrawal at any price.

China had lost one of the richest parts of the country without a declaration of war, and the policy of “first internal pacification, then resistance to the external enemy”, with which Chiang Kai-shek justified his concessions to Japan, weakened the authority of the government in Nanjing. The League of Nations proved powerless against a great power that sat on its Council. Japan suffered no consequences beyond moral condemnation, and in 1933 it simply left the League. Rome and Berlin took careful note of the lesson. Manchuria also became the longest land border between Japan and the Soviet Union. It was there that bloody clashes took place at Lake Khasan in 1938 and on the Khalkhin Gol in 1939, and there that the Red Army destroyed the Kwantung Army in August 1945.