The end of the Jinan incident

On 28 March 1929 in Nanjing the Foreign Minister of the Republic of China, Wang Zhengting, and the Japanese envoy to China, Kenkichi Yoshizawa, exchanged notes and signed a protocol closing the dispute over the bloody events at Jinan in May 1928. Japan undertook to withdraw all its troops from Shandong province within two months. The question of losses and compensation was to be examined by a joint commission, and both sides declared that the “unfortunate incident” now belonged to the past. Some lists of events state that Japan withdrew its troops from China on that day. In fact only the agreement was signed on 28 March. The Japanese left Jinan in May and completed the evacuation of Shandong around 20 May 1929. Nor did they withdraw from China altogether: the Kwantung Army remained in Manchuria, and a Japanese garrison, maintained there since the Boxer Rebellion, stayed in Tianjin and Beijing.

Eleven months of occupation

The Jinan incident began on 3 May 1928 with a shoot-out between Japanese soldiers and the army of Chiang Kai-shek, which had entered the capital of Shandong during the Northern Expedition. After several days of fighting and artillery fire, the Japanese 6th Division occupied the whole city on 11 May. Twenty-six Japanese soldiers and a dozen or so Japanese civilians were killed, along with – according to various estimates – between about 3,600 and more than 6,000 Chinese, including the Chinese diplomatic envoy Cai Gongshi and his staff. Chiang bypassed Jinan and completed his march on Beijing, but the city remained under Japanese occupation, and Japanese units were stationed along the railway from Qingdao.

Both sides set unacceptable conditions. Japan demanded an apology, the punishment of the Chinese officers responsible, compensation for the losses suffered by its citizens and guarantees of security for the future. The Nanjing government demanded first the withdrawal of troops and only then talks, as well as redress for the Chinese dead and the murdered diplomats. In the summer and autumn of 1928 the talks conducted by the Japanese diplomat from Shanghai, Shichitarō Yada, stalled several times. In China a boycott of Japanese goods, organised by hundreds of anti-Japanese committees, was under way, and Japanese firms were suffering huge losses.

A changing situation

Over those months Japan’s position deteriorated. On 4 June 1928 officers of the Kwantung Army assassinated Zhang Zuolin, and his son Zhang Xueliang, instead of submitting to Japan, recognised the authority of the Nanjing government on 29 December 1928. China was formally united, and the National Government was recognised in turn by the United States, Great Britain and other powers. Japan, which in August 1928 had signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact renouncing war as an instrument of policy, could not occupy a Chinese city indefinitely and found itself increasingly isolated. The Prime Minister, Giichi Tanaka, weakened by the affair of Zhang’s assassination, needed an end to a dispute that was costing him money and friends.

In Japan itself the Shandong expeditions were more and more widely seen as a failure of Tanaka’s “firm” policy. They were supposed to protect Japanese citizens and interests, but had brought a boycott that hit Japanese trade throughout China, and casualties among the very people they were meant to defend. The opposition Minseitō party accused the government of provoking the clash by sending in troops, and businessmen involved in the China trade demanded an end to the dispute. The army, for its part, did not want to leave Shandong without an apology and compensation, lest it look like a concession to the Chinese.

In January 1929 Yoshizawa took up the talks in Nanjing. At the beginning of February the two sides agreed on the principles: withdrawal of the troops and a joint investigation of the question of guilt and losses. The Japanese government, however, hesitated to sign. In March the agreement was finalised in confidential talks between the new Consul General in Shanghai, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and Chinese diplomats. The documents were signed on 28 March and published the same afternoon simultaneously in Nanjing and Tokyo.

The evacuation

The handover of the city did not go smoothly. At the beginning of April commissions of both sides agreed that the Japanese would leave Jinan between 18 and 20 April, but the Chinese troops failed to arrive in time and the new provincial authorities were still being organised, so the evacuation was postponed. On 5 May the Chinese gendarmerie took over the walled old city, and the Japanese withdrew to the commercial quarter. On 11 and 12 May the Japanese units left by rail for Qingdao. By around 20 May the evacuation of Shandong was complete. According to Japanese figures, the three Shandong expeditions of 1927–1929 had cost more than 41 million yen. In June 1929 Japan, later than the United States and Great Britain, recognised the National Government in Nanjing.

The joint commission that was to establish guilt and losses never met. The Chinese several times called on Japan to appoint its members but received no reply. In China the agreement was criticised for bringing neither an apology nor compensation for the civilian dead and for the death of Cai Gongshi. The victims of Jinan were commemorated with monuments, and in 1930 the families of the dead published a book documenting their fate. According to Chinese sources, when the Japanese occupied Jinan again in 1937 they searched for copies of it and destroyed them.

A reconciliation that did not last

The agreement of March 1929 opened a short period of détente. On 2 July 1929 the Tanaka government fell, and in the new cabinet of Osachi Hamaguchi the Foreign Ministry went once again to Kijūrō Shidehara, an advocate of a conciliatory policy towards China and of cooperation with the powers. Shidehara agreed to restore China’s tariff autonomy and tried to resolve disputes through negotiation. In Manchuria the army watched this with growing fury. Zhang Xueliang supported the Chinese call for the recovery of rights lost to foreigners, and built new railway lines and a port at Huludao intended to make the region independent of the Japanese railways and of Dalian. In 1929 he also tried to seize the Soviet-run Chinese Eastern Railway by force and lost a short war with the USSR.

The withdrawal from Shandong therefore did not mean that Japan had given up its influence on the continent. Rather, the army concluded that concessions to China led nowhere, and that Manchuria had to be secured before Chinese nationalism laid hands on it for good. On 18 September 1931 officers of the Kwantung Army staged the Mukden incident and began occupying Manchuria without asking the government’s consent. Shidehara’s policy collapsed, and with it hopes of a peaceful settlement of Sino-Japanese relations. Eight years after the Jinan agreement, in July 1937, China and Japan went to war – a war that lasted until 1945.