The Shanghai incident

Shortly before midnight on 28 January 1932 units of Japanese naval infantry, supported by armoured cars, advanced from the Hongkou district of Shanghai into the neighbouring Chinese-inhabited district of Zhabei. They expected the Chinese army to withdraw without a fight, as it had in Manchuria a few months earlier. Instead they met fierce resistance from the soldiers of the 19th Route Army. So began a war of more than five weeks in China’s largest city, before the eyes of thousands of foreigners in the international districts. The Chinese call it the 28 January incident (一·二八事变), the Japanese the first Shanghai incident, and Western literature also speaks of the Shanghai war of 1932. The fighting ceased on 3 March, but an armistice was not signed until 5 May.

Shanghai after the seizure of Manchuria

Shanghai was the financial and commercial heart of China, and at the same time a divided city. Alongside the Chinese municipality there were the International Settlement, run by a council dominated by the British, and the French Concession. More than twenty thousand Japanese lived there, concentrated mainly in Hongkou, which the Settlement’s defence plan had assigned to the Japanese naval infantry. Japan kept about a thousand sailors in the city and several warships on the Huangpu River.

After the Mukden incident of 18 September 1931 and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, a wave of anger swept Shanghai. An Anti-Japanese Association was formed, which proclaimed a boycott of Japanese goods, and its squads policed shops and punished merchants who traded with the Japanese. Japanese imports into China collapsed, Japanese-owned spinning mills were brought to a halt by strikes, and the children of Japanese residents were pelted with stones in the streets. The Japanese community demanded firm action from its government and navy.

At the turn of 1931 and 1932 units of the 19th Route Army appeared near the city. It was made up mainly of Cantonese, led by General Jiang Guangnai, and commanded directly by its army commander, General Cai Tingkai. The army had been sent there to rest after fighting the Communists in Jiangxi. Its soldiers, who had not been paid for months, were not trusted in Shanghai. The municipal authorities and the council of the International Settlement feared them no less than the Japanese.

In Nanjing, meanwhile, there was a crisis of power. Chiang Kai-shek, criticised for his passivity towards Japan, had resigned his posts on 15 December 1931, and the government of Sun Ke (Sun Fo) had neither money nor authority. At the end of January Chiang returned to politics, and on 28 January Wang Jingwei became premier. Both men believed that China was not ready for war with Japan and that the Communists had to be crushed first.

Monks, a towel factory and an ultimatum

On 8 January 1932 the Korean independence activist Lee Bong-chang threw a grenade at Emperor Hirohito’s carriage in Tokyo. The emperor was unhurt. The Kuomintang’s semi-official newspaper in Shanghai, Minguo Ribao, wrote that the assassin had “unfortunately” hit only an accompanying carriage. To the city’s Japanese residents this was an insult to the emperor.

On 18 January five Japanese – two monks and three lay followers of the Nichiren Buddhist sect, who were walking through the eastern part of the city beating hand drums – were beaten by a crowd outside the Sanyou towel factory, regarded as a centre of the anti-Japanese movement. One of the monks died in hospital a few days later. On the night of 19 to 20 January some thirty members of a Japanese youth association set fire to the factory and, on the way back, clashed with Chinese policemen of the International Settlement. One policeman and one of the attackers were killed.

After the war Major Ryūkichi Tanaka, in 1932 assistant military attaché in Shanghai, testified before the Tokyo tribunal and wrote in his memoirs that he had organised the attack on the monks himself, at the request of Colonel Seishirō Itagaki of the Kwantung Army. Itagaki is said to have wanted to stir up trouble in Shanghai that would divert the powers’ attention from Manchuria, where the proclamation of a new state was being prepared. The money and the men were reportedly supplied by his associate Yoshiko Kawashima, a Manchu princess brought up in Japan. Tanaka’s account is widely accepted in Chinese and Western historiography. Some Japanese historians point out that, apart from his word, there is no hard evidence for it.

The consul-general, Kuramatsu Murai, demanded that the mayor of Shanghai, Wu Tiecheng, apologise, punish those responsible, pay compensation and dissolve all anti-Japanese organisations. The navy, which had long wanted to match the army’s successes in China, sent reinforcements: cruisers, destroyers, a seaplane carrier and nearly a thousand more naval infantrymen. Their commander, Rear Admiral Kōichi Shiozawa, announced that if the Chinese did not give way he would “restore order” himself. On 27 January Murai issued an ultimatum expiring at 6 p.m. the following day.

The government in Nanjing ordered compliance. On the afternoon of 28 January Wu Tiecheng accepted all four demands, and the authorities closed down the Anti-Japanese Association. The consul declared the reply satisfactory. On the same day the council of the International Settlement declared a state of emergency, and the troops of the powers took up their assigned sectors. In the evening, however, Admiral Shiozawa announced that, for the sake of the safety of Japanese residents, his units would enter Zhabei, and he demanded that Chinese troops withdraw from it. Without waiting for a reply, he launched his attack at about 11.30 p.m.

The battle in the city

The Japanese reckoned on taking Zhabei within a few hours. Instead they became embroiled in street fighting for every house, and the 19th Route Army, contrary to instructions from Nanjing, accepted battle. On the morning of 29 January aircraft from the Japanese seaplane carrier bombed Zhabei. The printing works of the Commercial Press, China’s largest publisher, burned down, together with its Oriental Library, one of the largest collections of books in the country. Bombs fell on a densely populated district of a great city, and foreigners in the International Settlement, separated from the fighting only by Suzhou Creek, watched from close quarters. Photographs and films of Zhabei in flames, which went round the world at the time, survive to this day.

On the same day China appealed to the League of Nations. On 30 January the government announced that the capital would move from Nanjing, threatened by Japanese warships on the Yangtze, to Luoyang. On 1 February Japanese warships shelled Nanjing. Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed the principle of “resisting while negotiating”.

The navy could not cope on its own. On 31 January Vice Admiral Kichisaburō Nomura’s Third Fleet arrived at Shanghai with two aircraft carriers, Kaga and Hōshō, and the government in Tokyo agreed to send ground troops. In mid-February General Kenkichi Ueda’s 9th Division and the 24th Mixed Brigade landed. Chiang Kai-shek, for his part, although he did not want war, on 14 February formed the Fifth Army under General Zhang Zhizhong from the 87th and 88th Divisions and training units, and sent it to Shanghai. These were among the best government units, trained and equipped with the help of German military advisers.

On 18 February General Ueda demanded that the Chinese withdraw 20 kilometres from the boundaries of the International Settlement. Cai Tingkai refused. On 20 February the Japanese launched a major offensive against Jiangwan and Miaohang, north of the city, with artillery, tanks and aircraft. The defenders made use of the network of canals and of fortifications, counter-attacked and held up the advance for a week, inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese. In Japan propaganda made famous the “Three Brave Bomb Men”, sappers who were killed blowing up Chinese barbed-wire entanglements. On 22 February the American Robert Short, who was flying a Boeing fighter for the Chinese, was killed over Shanghai, shot down by three aircraft from the Kaga. Japan protested against an American taking part in the war.

After the failure of the February offensive Tokyo sent two more divisions, the 11th and 14th, to Shanghai and formed the Shanghai Expeditionary Army under the former War Minister, General Yoshinori Shirakawa. By the end of February the Japanese had several tens of thousands of troops, dozens of warships and hundreds of aircraft in the area of the city. On 1 March the 11th Division landed at Qiliaokou near Liuhe on the Yangtze, far behind the Chinese lines. Threatened with encirclement, the 19th Route Army and the Fifth Army withdrew on the night of 1 to 2 March to a second line of defence about 20 kilometres from the city. By 2 March the Japanese had taken Zhabei, Jiangwan and Wusong, and on 3 March Shirakawa ordered a halt to the fighting.

From ceasefire to armistice

It is often said that the fighting ended on 6 March. Japanese and Chinese sources point rather to 3 March, when the Japanese command announced that it was halting operations. On 4 March the extraordinary Assembly of the League of Nations, convened at China’s request, called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Japanese troops. Minor clashes nevertheless continued for several more days, and according to some accounts the Chinese agreed to cease fire only on 6 March. The date of 6 March thus refers to the end of the exchanges of fire rather than to the end of the battle. On 11 March the League Assembly also adopted a resolution committing its members not to recognise changes brought about by force, in line with the Stimson Doctrine.

Negotiations involving representatives of Britain, the United States, France and Italy, chaired by the British Minister to China, Miles Lampson, lasted from March to May. While they were under way, on 29 April, a Japanese celebration of the emperor’s birthday combined with a victory parade was held in Hongkou Park. The Korean independence activist Yun Bong-gil, sent by Kim Gu’s organisation in the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, threw a bomb hidden in a water flask at the reviewing stand. Sadatsugu Kawabata, chairman of the Japanese Residents’ Association, was killed, and General Shirakawa was gravely wounded and died on 26 May. The minister Mamoru Shigemitsu lost a leg and Admiral Nomura an eye, and General Ueda and Consul Murai were also wounded. Yun Bong-gil was sentenced to death and shot at Kanazawa in December 1932. In South Korea he is a national hero, and his deed won the Korean government-in-exile the support of Chiang Kai-shek.

On 5 May 1932 the Shanghai Ceasefire Agreement was signed. The Japanese were to withdraw their troops to the International Settlement and the extra-Settlement roads adjoining it, as before 28 January. The Chinese agreed not to bring troops into a zone around Shanghai, where order was to be kept by Chinese police alone. Japan, on the other hand, was allowed to keep its garrison of naval infantry in the city. Many in China regarded the agreement as a humiliation. Some studies describe Shanghai as a demilitarised zone. In reality this applied only to Chinese troops, while Japan kept its garrison in the city – which would matter five years later.

Casualties and destruction

According to official Japanese figures, about 770 Japanese soldiers were killed and more than 2,300 wounded – Japan’s heaviest losses since the war with Russia. According to tallies cited in Japanese sources, Chinese military losses amounted to more than 4,000 killed and more than 9,000 wounded. Chinese sources give a total of about 14,000 soldiers killed, wounded and missing. Civilians suffered most. The social affairs bureau of the Chinese municipality reported in March more than 6,000 residents killed and more than 10,000 missing. Much of Zhabei was reduced to rubble. According to Chinese figures, more than 4,000 shops and the homes of nearly 20,000 families were destroyed there, and universities in Wusong and Jiangwan were also damaged. During the fighting the Japanese residents of Hongkou formed armed vigilante groups which, on the pretext of hunting Chinese soldiers in civilian clothes, detained and killed random Chinese. Minister Shigemitsu reported to Tokyo that there might have been several hundred such victims, and likened the vigilantes’ conduct to the massacre of Koreans after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923.

Consequences in China and Japan

The defence of Shanghai by the 19th Route Army and the Fifth Army was the first time Chinese troops had put up effective resistance against the regular Japanese army for several weeks. Their commanders became heroes throughout China and among the Chinese abroad. The government in Nanjing, however, had no intention of turning the battle into a war. After the armistice the 19th Route Army was transferred to Fujian to fight the Communists. In November 1933 its commanders rebelled against Chiang and proclaimed a people’s government in Fuzhou, which government troops crushed at the beginning of 1934. Chiang Kai-shek returned to power as chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, and the slogan “first internal pacification, then external resistance” became his policy for the years that followed.

In Japan the war in Shanghai strengthened nationalist feeling. The newspapers wrote at length about the soldiers’ heroism and about “Chinese provocation”. On 15 May 1932, ten days after the armistice was signed, young naval officers shot Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai in Tokyo. It marked the end of party government in pre-war Japan. The aim for which, according to Tanaka, the unrest had been stirred up was achieved: while the world’s attention was fixed on Shanghai, the puppet state of Manchukuo was proclaimed in Manchuria on 1 March 1932.

A dress rehearsal

In many respects the battle of 1932 foreshadowed what happened in Shanghai five years later. The Japanese garrison left in the city by the armistice, clashes with the Chinese police and disputes over the demilitarised zone led in August 1937 to the second Shanghai incident and the Battle of Shanghai, one of the largest battles of the Sino-Japanese War. This time Chiang Kai-shek himself chose to throw his best, German-trained divisions into the fight.

The Shanghai incident was also the first major battle in a modern city involving aircraft, tanks and heavy artillery, fought before Western correspondents and newsreel cameras. The bombing of Zhabei foreshadowed the fate of civilians in the cities of the Second World War. It also showed the limits of what the League of Nations and the Western powers could do: they managed to mediate a ceasefire in a city where they had interests of their own, but did nothing to stop Japan in Manchuria.