The Japanese take Beijing

On 8 August 1937, in a drizzle, a column of Japanese soldiers marched through the Yongdingmen gate in the southern wall of Beijing. General Masakazu Kawabe’s brigade – more than three thousand men with armoured cars, according to Chinese accounts – paraded along Qianmen Street to the walls of the old imperial city. It was the kind of ceremonial victors’ “entry” that the Japanese army staged in captured cities. The inhabitants, gathered on the pavements, watched in silence. The capital of imperial China, officially called Beiping (Peiping) since 1928, came under Japanese occupation for eight years.

The date usually given for the occupation of Beijing by Japanese troops is 8 August. This is true, but only in part. The city had fallen ten days earlier: the Chinese 29th Army abandoned it on the night of 28–29 July, and the Japanese had been in practical control since the end of July. 8 August was the day of the formal entry of their troops into the city and, at the same time, the symbolic end of the first phase of the war in northern China.

Ultimatum and offensive

After the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge on the night of 7–8 July, talks went on for two weeks, interrupted by exchanges of fire. The commander of the 29th Army and chairman of the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, General Song Zheyuan, tried to reach an accommodation with the Japanese, but Japanese reinforcements from Manchuria and Korea kept arriving in the Beijing and Tianjin area, and the government of Fumimaro Konoe sent further forces to China. On 25 and 26 July there were clashes at Langfang station and at the Guang’anmen Gate in Beijing. The commander of the Japanese China Garrison Army, General Kiyoshi Katsuki, demanded the withdrawal of the Chinese 37th Division from the vicinity of the city, and when Song refused, Tokyo agreed on 27 July to send three divisions from Japan.

At 8 a.m. on 28 July the Japanese 20th Division, brought over from Korea, and several independent brigades, supported by aircraft, attacked the barracks and positions of the 29th Army at Nanyuan, south of the city. The Chinese defence, made up largely of poorly trained recruits and students, collapsed within a few hours. The deputy commander of the 29th Army, General Tong Linge, and the commander of the 132nd Division, General Zhao Dengyu, were killed – the first Chinese generals to fall in this war. In the afternoon Song handed over his offices, including that of mayor of Beijing, to General Zhang Zizhong and left for Baoding during the night. The troops of the 29th Army withdrew to the south and west. Beijing, with its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, its monuments and its universities, was given up without a fight for the city itself, to spare it from destruction.

Tongzhou and Tianjin

On 29 July in Tongzhou, about twenty kilometres east of Beijing and the seat of the puppet East Hebei government, that government’s Japanese-trained Chinese troops (the East Hebei Army) mutinied. Most of the Japanese garrison happened to be near Beijing. The mutineers massacred the remaining soldiers and the Japanese and Korean residents of the town, including women and children. According to various accounts, the number of civilian victims ranged from just over two hundred to about 260. An American journalist who was on the spot counted 117 Japanese and 106 Koreans dead. The causes of the mutiny are disputed: those cited include the mistaken bombing of the unit’s barracks by Japanese aircraft two days earlier, Chinese radio propaganda proclaiming victories over the Japanese, and secret contacts with the Kuomintang. The Japanese press described the massacre in every detail, and the slogan “punish outrageous China” became a war cry. From then on the Tongzhou atrocity served Japanese propaganda as a justification for the war.

That same day units of the 38th Division attacked Japanese positions in Tianjin. Japanese aircraft and artillery responded by bombarding the Chinese part of the city. Among the places destroyed was Nankai University, which the Japanese regarded as a centre of anti-Japanese agitation. On 30 July the Chinese withdrew from Tianjin and from the Dagu forts at the mouth of the river. By the end of July both great cities of the north were in Japanese hands. The last Chinese units that had remained in Beijing to keep order were disarmed in the first days of August or fought their way out to the west.

A city under occupation

As early as 30 July a local peace preservation committee was set up in Beijing under Japanese supervision, headed by the elderly politician Jiang Chaozong. Zhang Zizhong, who under his arrangement with Song was to cover the evacuation and negotiate with the Japanese, was denounced as a traitor in the Chinese press. According to Chinese biographies, he escaped from the city in disguise at the beginning of August and in the autumn made a public apology in Nanjing. He regained trust at the front: he was killed fighting the Japanese in 1940, the highest-ranking Chinese general to fall in this war.

On 8 August, the day of the ceremonial entry, the General Staff in Tokyo approved the operation in Chahar province that the Kwantung Army had been demanding for weeks. Japanese troops advanced from the Beijing area to the Nankou Pass and on towards Zhangjiakou. Among the forces fighting there was the 5th Division of General Seishirō Itagaki, one of the perpetrators of the Mukden incident. The war in northern China ceased to be an “incident” around a single bridge and became a campaign for the whole North China Plain. The next day in Shanghai Chinese soldiers of the Peace Preservation Corps shot dead a Japanese naval infantry officer near Hongqiao airfield, and a few days later the war reached China’s largest city.

Beijing remained under occupation until 1945. On 14 December 1937 the Japanese set up there the collaborationist Provisional Government of the Republic of China, headed by the banker and politician Wang Kemin, and the city was given back its old name of Beijing. Peking University, Tsinghua University and the devastated Nankai moved south, where in 1938 they merged in Kunming as the National Southwestern Associated University. Thousands of students and lecturers set off on foot and by rail into the interior. The Japanese troops in the Beijing area surrendered only on 10 October 1945, at a ceremony in the Forbidden City.

Significance

The loss of Beijing and Tianjin in less than three weeks showed how weak the 29th Army was and how little the local compromises on which Song Zheyuan had counted to the end were worth. The Japanese military, having taken the cities so easily, became convinced that the whole war would last a few months. In Tokyo it was said that one more powerful blow would be enough to make China give way. The opposite happened. The fall of the old capital did not break the government of Chiang Kai-shek, which, as it had announced in July, opted for war along the entire front and threw its best divisions into the fighting at Shanghai. The truce with the Communists concluded after the Xi’an incident grew in September into a united front against Japan.

For Japan, the capture of Beijing was the beginning of a war it could not bring to an end. Every new victory, from Shanghai to Nanjing and Wuhan, gave rise to new demands and to new divisions sent deep into China, and the cost of this war pushed Tokyo towards an alliance with Germany and finally towards seizing the raw materials of South-East Asia, which in December 1941 meant war with the United States and Britain.