The Jinan incident

On the morning of 3 May 1928 in Jinan, capital of the Chinese province of Shandong, shots were exchanged between Japanese soldiers and units of the National Revolutionary Army, which had entered the city two days earlier during the Northern Expedition. The street shooting grew into fighting in which soldiers on both sides were killed, along with a dozen or so Japanese civilians and a Chinese diplomat together with his entire staff. A few days later a reinforced Japanese division shelled the old city and on 11 May occupied the whole of Jinan. By Chinese reckoning several thousand Chinese were killed, most of them civilians. The Japanese called these events the Jinan incident (済南事件); the Chinese still speak of the “May Third Tragedy” (五三慘案). It was a limited armed conflict, not a war: Chiang Kai-shek withdrew his troops and bypassed the city in order to complete the unification of China. Jinan was nonetheless the first serious clash between the Japanese army and the forces of China’s Nationalist government, a foretaste of the conflict that nine years later turned into open war.

Japan in Shandong

Japan had regarded Shandong as part of its sphere of influence since 1914, when it seized the German base at Qingdao and the railway running from there to Jinan. At the Paris Peace Conference the victors awarded Japan the former German rights in the province, which set off a wave of protest in China; how much the issue meant to Tokyo was also brought home at the time to the authors of the Japanese racial equality proposal. Only in 1922, during the conference that produced the Washington Naval Treaty, did Japan agree to return Shandong to China and withdraw its troops. It retained, however, extensive economic interests. China bought back the Qingdao–Jinan railway with money borrowed from Japan, Japanese firms ran mines and factories, and according to figures from the Japanese Foreign Ministry nearly 17,000 Japanese were living in Shandong at the end of 1927, about 2,200 of them in Jinan itself. Japanese investment in the province was estimated at around 150 million yen.

In 1926 Chiang Kai-shek set out north from Canton to crush the warlords and unite the country under the rule of the Kuomintang. Along the way, in March 1927, his soldiers and local demonstrators attacked foreign consulates in Nanjing, and in April the Japanese concession in Hankou. The powers feared that similar scenes would be repeated wherever the National Revolutionary Army went. Chiang, who in April 1927 had crushed the Communists in Shanghai, gave assurances that he would not allow attacks on foreigners, but he was not always in control of his generals.

In April 1927 General Giichi Tanaka, leader of the Rikken Seiyūkai party, became Prime Minister of Japan and also took the Foreign Ministry. He promised a “firm” policy towards China in place of the conciliatory line of his predecessor at the Foreign Ministry, Kijūrō Shidehara. When the Nationalist armies approached Shandong in the spring of 1927, Tanaka sent some 2,000 soldiers there from Manchuria. This was the first of the so-called Shandong expeditions. There was no clash on that occasion, because in August 1927 Chiang resigned his post and halted the advance, and the Japanese withdrew their troops in September. On 5 November 1927 Chiang met Tanaka in Tokyo. The Prime Minister advised him to content himself with consolidating his power in the south instead of pushing north towards Shandong and Manchuria. Chiang replied that he could not agree to this. The conversation came to nothing.

The second Shandong expedition

In January 1928 Chiang returned as commander-in-chief, and in April the Nationalists, together with the armies of their allied generals Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan, resumed the Northern Expedition. The troops of Sun Chuanfang and Zhang Zongchang, allies of the Beijing dictator Zhang Zuolin, fell back rapidly. On 19 April Tanaka’s government decided to send the 6th Division from Kumamoto, under Lieutenant General Hikosuke Fukuda, to Shandong, officially to protect Japanese nationals. Tanaka had his doubts, but in February 1928 his party had fought Japan’s first general election under universal male suffrage with the slogan of “protecting our compatriots on the spot”, and the army was pressing. Both the government in Beijing and the Nationalist government in Nanjing protested, regarding the dispatch of troops as a violation of China’s sovereignty.

On 20 April three companies of the Japanese garrison from Tianjin arrived in Jinan, followed over the next few days by the advance brigade of the 6th Division under Major General Ryū Saitō. The division’s main body had originally been meant to stay in Qingdao, but when the railway and telegraph were cut at the end of April, Fukuda led it to Jinan, arriving on 2 May. The Japanese surrounded the commercial quarter, where most of the foreigners lived, with barricades of sandbags and barbed wire. On 29 April the Northern troops left Jinan, and on 30 April and 1 May Nationalist units entered it without a fight. Chiang Kai-shek arrived on 2 May. He asked the Japanese to remove the barricades and assured them that his army would keep order. General Saitō agreed, and during the night of 2–3 May the Japanese began dismantling the defences.

3 May

Who started it is still unknown. According to the Japanese version, on the morning of 3 May about thirty Chinese soldiers looted a shop selling a Japanese newspaper and beat its owner, and when a patrol under Lieutenant Yoshiharu Kumekawa came running, the Chinese opened fire. According to the Chinese version, Japanese soldiers refused to let through a sick Chinese soldier being taken to a mission hospital, an argument broke out and the Japanese shot him together with a porter. Other accounts also circulated. The Japanese army immediately destroyed the Chinese radio station and had the only working communications with Jinan, so for the first few days the world’s press repeated mainly the Japanese version of events.

The shooting quickly spread across the whole commercial quarter. Japanese soldiers fought units of General He Yaozu’s 40th Army, while Chinese soldiers and local assailants killed and robbed Japanese who had remained outside the barricades. According to Japanese figures, twelve Japanese civilians were killed and two later died of their wounds. Some of the bodies were cruelly mutilated, as British diplomats also confirmed. Japanese officers themselves recorded, however, that the victims were mostly people who had ignored calls to evacuate, including drug dealers, and that some of the killings had been committed by local people rather than soldiers. Meanwhile in Japan newspapers, drawing on army dispatches, reported on 5 May that 280 Japanese had been massacred. The figure was exaggerated more than tenfold, but it inflamed public opinion, which demanded that China be “punished”.

On the evening of 3 May Japanese soldiers burst into the building in which Cai Gongshi, the Nanjing government’s special envoy for relations with foreigners in Shandong, had his office. They killed him and sixteen – according to other sources fifteen – of his staff and guards. The Chinese side stated that Cai, who protested in Japanese, had his ears and nose cut off and his eyes gouged out, and that the others were stripped, flogged and machine-gunned. The Japanese claimed that they had been fired on from the building and that Cai had died in the fighting. Even Japanese historians now agree that killing every single member of a diplomatic mission’s staff was a crime, and in China Cai Gongshi’s death became the symbol of the whole incident.

Ceasefire, ultimatum and assault

Chiang Kai-shek did not want a war with Japan, which could wreck the unification of the country. He forbade his soldiers to fight, agreed a ceasefire with Fukuda and began withdrawing his main forces from Jinan, leaving only a small garrison in the city. The Japanese, however, accused him of failing to carry out the agreement, and on 4 May a Japanese liaison officer, Lieutenant Colonel Tōichi Sasaki, was beaten up. Tanaka agreed to send reinforcements from Manchuria and Korea, and later from Japan as well. This was the third Shandong expedition. The first fresh units reached Jinan on 7 May.

That afternoon Fukuda presented the Chinese with an ultimatum with a twelve-hour deadline. He demanded the punishment of the officers responsible, the disarming of the units concerned in front of the Japanese, the evacuation of two barracks near Jinan, a ban on anti-Japanese propaganda and the withdrawal of all Chinese troops to 20 li – about ten kilometres – from the Qingdao–Jinan railway. The demands could not possibly be met within such a deadline. Chiang, who had already left the city, replied that he would accept some of them. Fukuda judged the reply insufficient and on 8 May launched an attack. The heaviest fighting came during the night of 9–10 May, when Japanese artillery shelled the walled old city, in which the last Chinese soldiers were holding out. No one warned the inhabitants. During the night of 10–11 May the defenders slipped out of the city on Chiang’s orders, and on 11 May the Japanese occupied the whole of Jinan.

Casualties

The death toll is disputed. According to Japanese figures, 26 Japanese soldiers were killed and 157 wounded. Chinese committees that investigated the matter immediately after the events counted 3,945 Chinese civilians killed and 1,537 wounded, while a later tally by an association of victims’ families gave 6,123 killed and 1,701 wounded. Japanese historians who have studied the matter put the number of Chinese dead, civilians and soldiers, at around 3,600. Most died in the shelling and street fighting of 8–11 May, but Chinese accounts also speak of the killing of prisoners, wounded men and chance passers-by after the city was taken. Jinan remained under Japanese occupation until March 1929. The army imposed censorship of the post and the press, banned gatherings and punished people suspected of sympathy for the Kuomintang.

Chiang chooses patience

On 10 May Chiang apologised to the Japanese and recalled General He Yaozu, but he refused to be drawn into war. His armies bypassed Jinan, crossed the Yellow River at other points and advanced on Beijing, from which Zhang Zuolin withdrew at the beginning of June. The Nanjing government appealed for help to the powers and to the League of Nations, but obtained nothing. A wave of outrage swept China. Anti-Japanese committees sprang up and a boycott of Japanese goods began, which also spread to Chinese merchants abroad, for example in Siam. Chinese public opinion, which until then had regarded Britain as the main enemy, from now on turned against Japan.

Chiang himself wrote in his diary that Japan was China’s greatest enemy, and for years afterwards he began each day’s entry with a call to wipe out the humiliation. He told cadets that they must first become strong and hide their hatred until the very last moment. This attitude – postponing a confrontation with Japan until China was united and armed – defined his policy for the next nine years.

The long shadow of Jinan

The Jinan incident showed how weak the civilian government in Tokyo’s authority over the army was. Tanaka did not want war with Chiang, yet a general in the field could on his own initiative issue an ultimatum and bombard a Chinese city, and the government kept sending him reinforcements. The historian Akira Iriye saw the episode as one of the first signs of the military insubordination that became the rule in the years that followed. Only a month later officers of the Kwantung Army went a step further and assassinated Zhang Zuolin, and in 1931 they staged the Mukden incident and seized the whole of Manchuria.

On the other hand, Jinan convinced many Japanese officers that a China united by the Kuomintang would threaten Japanese interests on the continent and must be stopped before it grew strong. Mutual distrust, propaganda on both sides and the memory of the victims entered a spiral that led to the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937 and to the Second Sino-Japanese War. In December 1937 the Japanese took Jinan again, this time for eight years. The choice Chiang made in May 1928 – to give way at Jinan in order to take Beijing – became the pattern of his policy towards Japan until 1937, and critics, including some in his own camp, accused him of merely encouraging the Japanese to make further demands by giving way.

The photographs from the post-mortem examinations of the Japanese victims of May 1928 had a curious afterlife. After the war some of them were published in China, and even in Japan, as supposed pictures of victims of the experiments of the Japanese Unit 731. The error was exposed by the Japanese researcher Masayoshi Hara. It is one of many examples of how the memory of the incident still falls prey to propaganda on both sides.