The Tianjin incident

On 14 June 1939 Japanese troops in occupied Tianjin, the great port of northern China, surrounded the British and French concessions – districts of the city administered by foreigners since the 19th century – with barbed wire and checkpoints. The pretext was the refusal to hand over four Chinese men suspected of involvement in the murder of an official who had collaborated with the Japanese. It very soon became clear, however, that the dispute was not about four men. The Japanese army wanted to force Britain to stop propping up the Chinese currency and the government of Chiang Kai-shek. At the barriers Japanese soldiers publicly stripped and searched British subjects, women included, which caused an uproar in Britain. Throughout the summer of 1939, while the crisis over Gdańsk (Danzig) was building in Europe, London and Tokyo were locked in their sharpest dispute since the end of their alliance in 1923, and a wave of anti-British demonstrations swept Japan. The crisis ended with a British concession over the four suspects but left the main issue unresolved: the blockade of the concessions lasted until June 1940. Along the way, on 26 July 1939, the United States gave notice to terminate its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. It was the first step towards the American sanctions that two years later cut Japan off from oil.

Concessions in an occupied city

Tianjin, a port at the mouth of the Hai River and Beijing’s gateway to the sea, had been one of the treaty ports since the Opium Wars. Along the river stretched the concessions: the British, founded in 1860, the French, the Italian, the Japanese and several others. Each had its own administration, police and courts, and the foreigners living there enjoyed extraterritoriality. The British concession was the centre of Western trade in northern China. It was home to some 1,500 British subjects and several tens of thousands of Chinese, many of them wealthy people who had taken refuge there from the war.

On 30 July 1937, after taking Beijing and Tianjin, the Japanese occupied the whole city except the concessions. They did not enter them because they were not at war with Britain or France, but the concessions became a thorn in their side. The banks of the British district held silver reserves belonging to the Chinese government, which Japan did not recognise. The currency in circulation there was the fabi, issued by the government in Chongqing, while in the occupied north the Japanese were introducing the money of the puppet Provisional Government and its Federal Reserve Bank. Finally, the concessions were a refuge for the Chinese underground. The British police, who did not recognise the collaborationist authorities, stopped handing detained Chinese over to them, and resistance activists and the counter-intelligence agents of Dai Li preferred to risk a British prison rather than Japanese torture.

The dispute had been growing since the autumn of 1938. The Japanese army demanded the handover of people suspected of guerrilla activity, and from December 1938 to February 1939 it restricted traffic into the concessions for the first time. In Tokyo it was increasingly believed that British money was keeping China alive. After the defeats of 1937 and 1938 Chiang Kai-shek’s government, pushed deep into the interior, was losing revenue and printing money. Britain had extended credits to it, and in March 1939 a £10 million stabilisation fund for the Chinese currency was set up, half of it contributed by British banks with a British Treasury guarantee and half by Chinese banks. Japan regarded this as an attack on the “New Order in East Asia” proclaimed in November 1938 by Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe.

A murder in a cinema

On the evening of 9 April 1939 Cheng Xigeng was shot dead in the Grand Theatre cinema in the British concession. He was a man with an unusual biography: a doctor of economics from the London School of Economics, a member of the Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and for many years an official of the Chinese diplomatic service and finance ministry, who in 1937 had gone over to the occupiers. He headed the Tianjin branch of the Federal Reserve Bank and in March 1939 became superintendent of the Tianjin customs. According to Chinese memoirs the shots were fired by a pupil of the Nankai secondary school belonging to an anti-Japanese youth organisation, some of whose members worked with Kuomintang intelligence. A Swiss bystander was also killed in the attack, and a Russian émigré who tried to stop the assassin was seriously wounded.

The Japanese named six residents of the concession. The British police arrested four of them – none of whom, according to later Chinese findings, was the actual killer – and handed them to the Japanese gendarmerie for questioning on condition that they be returned after a few days. They were returned. Two had confessed to taking part in the attack, but it turned out that the confessions had been extracted by torture. The Consul General, Edgar Jamieson, and the Ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, believed the four should be handed over so as not to give the army a pretext. The Ambassador to China, Archibald Clark Kerr, under pressure from Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Soong Mei-ling, argued that this would mean sending men to their deaths for fighting the occupier. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, backed Clark Kerr: the suspects would not be handed over until the Japanese produced evidence other than confessions beaten out of them.

The blockade

The Japanese forces in Tianjin were commanded by General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 27th Division, who had spent several years in Britain as a liaison officer and military attaché, spoke good English and was regarded by the British as a moderate. The hard line was represented by the chief of staff of the North China Area Army, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who since the start of the year had favoured eliminating the Western concessions; the Area Army itself was commanded by General Hajime Sugiyama. At the beginning of June the Japanese presented the British with an ultimatum: hand over the suspects or face a blockade. On 13 June Homma issued a proclamation, and on the morning of 14 June Japanese soldiers closed off access to the British and French concessions. Some accounts give 15 June, because that was the day the blockade came fully into effect.

Barbed-wire fences, partly electrified, went up around both districts, and traffic was channelled through a few checkpoints. Everyone entering or leaving was searched. The Chinese were treated brutally, and foreigners, including British men and women, were stripped at the barriers in front of crowds. British ships on the river were inspected, and supplies of food and fuel were held up or delayed. Prices in the concession soared. As late as 24 July Chamberlain told the House of Commons that “the milk situation is fairly satisfactory”, although deliveries were still waiting at the barriers.

The Japanese soon admitted that handing over the four suspects would not end the blockade. A Japanese spokesman said that “the arrow has already left the bow”. The demands now included the surrender of the Chinese silver in the British banks, the withdrawal of the fabi from circulation in the concession, a ban on anti-Japanese propaganda and cooperation with the “New Order”. On 16 June the British Foreign Office replied that accepting these terms would mean abandoning, under threat of force, a policy Britain had pursued together with the other powers. On 20 June Halifax repeated in the House of Lords that the suspects would not be handed over without sound evidence.

London without a fleet

On paper the answer was simple: for years British strategy in the Far East had rested on sending the main fleet to Singapore in a crisis. In the summer of 1939 this was impossible. At the end of June the Chiefs of Staff and the Admiralty reported to the government that the only way to break the blockade would be a naval demonstration, but sending the fleet would leave European waters exposed just when Germany was threatening Poland, to which Britain had given a guarantee. France, bound to Britain in Europe, did not want the Mediterranean fleet weakened after Germany and Italy had concluded the Pact of Steel, and Prime Minister Édouard Daladier made it clear that London could expect nothing from France in its dispute with Japan. The United States, asked about joint action, refused. According to historians, the Japanese, who were reading some American diplomatic correspondence, knew this.

Throughout the summer Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that the government was considering economic retaliation, and the Board of Trade drew up a list of possible sanctions, including the termination of the commercial treaty with Japan. According to the surviving minutes, Far Eastern affairs were discussed at eight of the nine British Cabinet meetings between 14 June and 2 August, on a par with Europe. At the same time, however, Chamberlain instructed Craigie to seek an agreement that would end the crisis without excessive loss of prestige.

In Japan the mood was the opposite. The press, the army and nationalist organisations ran an anti-British campaign, rallies were held in many cities, and the Home Minister, Kōichi Kido, made no attempt to restrain them. During this time the Japanese gendarmerie detained the British military attaché, Colonel Spear, on a charge of entering occupied territory illegally. The government of Kiichirō Hiranuma was divided. The War Minister, Seishirō Itagaki, wanted to use the crisis to force through a military alliance with Germany and Italy directed against Britain as well, which Joachim von Ribbentrop had been pressing for. The Foreign Minister, Hachirō Arita, the Navy Minister, Mitsumasa Yonai, and the Prime Minister himself believed that Japan, bogged down in the war in China and fighting the Red Army at Khalkhin Gol since May, could not afford a third war. Emperor Hirohito let it be known that he did not want a conflict with Britain that would push Japan into Germany’s arms.

The Craigie–Arita formula

On 15 July Craigie and Arita began preliminary talks in Tokyo. The Japanese demanded that before Tianjin was discussed, Britain should recognise the “actual situation” in China. On 24 July Chamberlain read the agreed formula to the House of Commons: His Majesty’s Government “fully recognise the actual situation in China, where hostilities on a large scale are in progress”, and noted that, as long as that state of affairs continued, the Japanese forces had “special requirements” for safeguarding their own security and maintaining order in the areas they controlled, and had to suppress any acts that harmed them or helped their enemy. The British government undertook not to support such acts and announced that it would instruct the British authorities and British subjects in China accordingly.

Chamberlain insisted that the formula meant no change in policy towards China and that the further talks concerned only local matters in Tianjin. In the British press and among the opposition there were comparisons with Munich. In Chongqing the formula was received with indignation, and the Chinese Ambassador in London lodged a protest. The Japanese press hailed it as a British capitulation. In reality it was a vague declaration. In it the British gave away nothing on the issue that mattered most to Japan, namely money for China.

The American response

Washington watched the talks with concern. If Britain was giving way, someone had to show Japan that its conduct had a price. On 26 July, two days after the formula was announced, Secretary of State Cordell Hull handed the Japanese Ambassador a note terminating the American–Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation of 1911. Under its terms it would expire after six months, on 26 January 1940. In this way the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt pre-empted a resolution to the same effect introduced in the Senate a few days earlier by the Republican Arthur Vandenberg. Once the treaty had lapsed, there was no longer any legal obstacle to restricting exports to Japan, and Japan imported most of its oil and steel scrap from the United States.

Tokyo understood what this meant. General Shunroku Hata, then the Emperor’s chief aide-de-camp, noted that Hirohito was agitated: he said it would be a heavy blow to supplies of scrap and oil, that difficulties would arise within six months, and that the army and navy should have prepared for this long ago.

Concession and deadlock

The talks on local matters made slow progress. In August the British government agreed to hand over the four suspects, which provoked a wave of protest in Britain: MPs received letters from constituents, and according to historians the affair of the four Chinese was one of the most discreditable for Chamberlain’s government, although the war soon overshadowed it. The Chinese government protested, warning that the men would be executed once handed over. The date of the handover itself is uncertain. Most English-language accounts give 20 August, while Chinese sources speak of 5 September 1939. What is known is that all four were publicly executed by the Japanese.

Britain stopped at concessions on police matters. When it came to the silver and the fabi, London stipulated that these issues also concerned the other powers and consulted Washington and Paris, which firmly advised against concessions. Around 20 August the talks in Tokyo broke down. The blockade continued, and in the second half of August Tianjin was also struck by a great flood that inundated much of the city, the concessions included.

At the same time the course of Japanese foreign policy was being decided. On 8 August, at a five-minister conference, Itagaki again demanded an alliance with Germany, while Hiranuma, Arita, Yonai and the Finance Minister opposed it, fearing that it would drag Japan into war with Britain and France, and perhaps with the USSR and the United States as well. The dispute was cut short on 23 August by Berlin, which concluded a non-aggression pact with the USSR – the very country Japan was then fighting at Khalkhin Gol. Tokyo regarded this as a betrayal. On 28 August Hiranuma’s government resigned, and the new Prime Minister, General Nobuyuki Abe, announced after the outbreak of war in Europe that Japan would not become involved and would concentrate on ending the war in China.

Significance

The Tianjin incident was a dress rehearsal for what was to happen in Asia over the next two years. It showed that Britain, under threat in Europe, was unable to defend its interests in China by force, and that France would not help in the matter. The Japanese army learned that pressure on isolated concessions and colonies could extract concessions. At the same time the crisis prompted the United States, for the first time, to take a real economic step against Japan.

After the outbreak of war in Europe the dispute died down, but the blockade continued. It was ended only by an Anglo-Japanese agreement signed in Tokyo on 19 June 1940, a week after the Germans took Paris: both currencies were to circulate in the concession, the police were to cooperate more closely with the Japanese, and the silver was sealed in a bank, except for roughly a tenth set aside for famine relief in northern China. A month later, under Japanese pressure, Britain closed the Burma Road, China’s main supply route, for three months. After the 1911 treaty had lapsed, the United States introduced export licences for fuel and raw materials from July 1940, banned scrap exports in the autumn, and in the summer of 1941, after the Japanese moved into southern Indochina, froze Japanese assets, which in practice cut Japan off from American oil. The Japanese leadership concluded that it had to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies by force. On 8 December 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor by Asian time, Japanese soldiers marched unopposed into the British concession in Tianjin. Britain formally renounced it in a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in January 1943.