The Xi’an incident

At dawn on 12 December 1936 several hundred soldiers of Zhang Xueliang’s bodyguard attacked the former imperial spa of Huaqing at the foot of Mount Li, some 30 kilometres from Xi’an. Staying there was China’s leader, Chiang Kai-shek, who had come to the capital of Shaanxi province to prepare a new offensive against the communists in person. Chiang escaped through a window and over a wall onto the snow-covered hillside, but was found a few hours later. At the same time General Yang Hucheng’s troops took control of Xi’an and arrested the ministers and generals of the Nanjing government staying at a hotel there. Zhang and Yang did not want to kill Chiang or take his power. They wanted to force him to stop fighting Chinese and start fighting the Japanese. The Chinese call the event a “military remonstrance” (bingjian); in the West it became known as the Xi’an incident. It lasted two weeks and ended with Chiang’s release on 25 December, but it changed China’s policy on the eve of war with Japan.

First internal pacification

After the Mukden incident of 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria, in 1932 it set up the state of Manchukuo there, and in 1933 it moved beyond the Great Wall and, through the Tanggu Truce, imposed on China a demilitarised zone near Beijing. In the years that followed its influence in northern China grew further. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Kuomintang and of the government in Nanjing, believed that his army was not ready for war with Japan as long as the country was divided. His slogan was “first internal pacification, then external resistance”. He regarded the communists as the most dangerous enemy. The Japanese, he said, were a disease of the skin, communism a disease of the heart.

The communists, however, had survived the Long March and in October 1935 reached impoverished northern Shaanxi. At that time their leadership, with Mao Zedong, was changing its line. Under the influence of the Communist International, which in the summer of 1935 had proclaimed the policy of popular fronts against fascism, the party began calling on all Chinese to fight Japan together. In 1936 the slogan “resist Japan and fight Chiang” gave way to “force Chiang to resist Japan”. Public opinion, especially in the cities, was on the side of resistance. On 9 December 1935 large student demonstrations against concessions to the Japanese broke out in Beijing, and in 1936 a nationwide National Salvation Association was founded.

A conspiracy in the north-west

To fight the communists in Shaanxi, Chiang sent the troops he could least rely on in this matter. Zhang Xueliang, son of Zhang Zuolin, the ruler of Manchuria assassinated by the Japanese, commanded the Northeastern Army – more than a hundred thousand soldiers who had not seen their homes since 1931 and wanted to win back Manchuria, not die in a civil war. He was deputy commander of the North-West Bandit Suppression Headquarters, based in Xi’an. The second force was the Northwestern Army of General Yang Hucheng, a former Shaanxi warlord, numbering several tens of thousands of men. In the autumn of 1935 the Red Army routed several of Zhang’s divisions. The communists treated their prisoners well and sent them back with the message that they wanted a joint struggle against Japan.

Yang quickly concluded a secret truce with the communists. Zhang hesitated longer, but at the beginning of 1936 he agreed to a ceasefire, and in April he met Zhou Enlai secretly in Yan’an. The front fell almost completely quiet, and fighting was even staged to deceive Nanjing. In the north-west an informal alliance emerged between two government armies and the enemy they were supposed to destroy. Its members were united by the desire to fight Japan, but not by their aims. The communists wanted, with Soviet help, to build an independent base in the north-west against both Japan and Chiang. Zhang and Yang still wanted to persuade Chiang to lead the resistance himself. In August 1936 Moscow rejected the plan for a base and ordered the communists to seek a united front with Chiang, not against him.

In the autumn of 1936 Chiang was self-confident. He had overcome a revolt by the generals of Guangdong and Guangxi, and that autumn Muslim cavalry from Ningxia and Gansu had routed a communist column marching to collect Soviet supplies. Chiang concluded that he could finish the communists by force and prepared a sixth encirclement campaign. The secret talks his men were conducting with a communist envoy stalled over terms that amounted to capitulation. On 31 October, at the celebrations of Chiang’s fiftieth birthday in Luoyang, Zhang Xueliang asked him to end the civil war and was sharply rebuked. In November, while the Suiyuan campaign was under way in the north – in which the Chinese, for the first time in a long while, beat Japanese-backed opponents – Chiang had seven leaders of the National Salvation Association arrested in Shanghai. Two days later Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany. For Zhang, the arrests were proof that Chiang preferred fighting his own countrymen to fighting the invader. On 3 December in Luoyang Zhang begged once more for a change of policy. He was told that he was the only man in the country who thought that way.

The coup

On 4 December 1936 Chiang arrived in Xi’an and took up residence at the Huaqing spa. He knew from intelligence reports of Zhang’s contacts with the communists but did not believe he was in any danger. He was confident he could force Zhang to obey. On 9 December he gave Zhang and Yang an ultimatum: either their troops would move against the communists, or they would be transferred to southern China and central government troops would take over. The same day, the anniversary of the Beijing demonstrations, thousands of students from Xi’an set out towards Huaqing demanding resistance to Japan. The police opened fire and wounded a child. Zhang stopped the march with a promise that within a week he would answer with deeds. Chiang announced that orders for the new offensive would be issued on 12 December. According to the historian Rana Mitter, the threat of losing his army decided Zhang.

On the evening of 11 December Zhang and Yang revealed their plan to their closest commanders, and during the night Zhang informed the communists by radio. Early on 12 December a detachment of the bodyguard under Captain Sun Mingjiu, who had orders to bring Chiang back alive, attacked Huaqing. A gunfight with the guards broke out at the gate. Chiang, woken by the shots, in his nightclothes and without his false teeth, jumped out of a window, climbed over a wall, injuring his back in the process, and hid among the rocks on the hillside. A few hours later soldiers found him exhausted and frozen and carried him down. He was taken to Xi’an, where Zhang explained that he had detained him in order to force him to change his policy. Chiang, as he later wrote himself, replied that Zhang could shoot him, but he would not negotiate with a rebel.

Meanwhile Yang’s soldiers occupied the government offices, the airfield and the police headquarters in Xi’an, as well as the hotel where Chiang’s guests were staying. Among those captured were Generals Chen Cheng, Jiang Dingwen, Wei Lihuang and Zhu Shaoliang and the Governor of Shaanxi, Shao Lizi. One Kuomintang official, Shao Yuanchong, was shot while trying to escape and died two days later. For several days Yang’s soldiers looted the city. Zhang and Yang sent a telegram to Nanjing and to the whole country with eight demands: the reorganisation of the government to include all parties and groups; an end to all civil war; the release of the leaders of the national salvation movement arrested in Shanghai and of all political prisoners; freedom for the patriotic movement; freedom of assembly and association; fidelity to the testament of Sun Yat-sen; and the immediate convening of a national salvation conference. They gave assurances that Chiang was in no danger.

Two weeks

The news caused shock throughout China. Despite resentment of the policy of concessions, most of the press and the public sided with Chiang, who was seen as the only man capable of holding the country together. Students in the north welcomed the coup, but almost none of the important generals and governors openly supported it. Zhang’s calculations failed: even Yan Xishan in neighbouring Shanxi, who also had a secret understanding with the communists, called for Chiang’s release. In Nanjing the War Minister, He Yingqin, wanted to attack Xi’an. On 16 December the government proclaimed a punitive expedition, central troops occupied the Tongguan Pass and aircraft bombed towns east of Xi’an. Chiang’s wife, Soong Mei-ling (Soong Mei-ling), and his brother-in-law Kong Xiangxi (H. H. Kung) feared that an attack would end in Chiang’s death and pressed for talks. Japan warned the Nanjing government that it would regard acceptance of the eight demands as a turn towards the communists and would not leave it unanswered.

The communists, in their then capital of Bao’an, received the news with joy. On 13 December their leadership decided that Chiang should be removed from power and put before a people’s tribunal. Moscow, however, reacted differently. On 14 December Pravda and Izvestia denounced the coup as a plot by pro-Japanese forces, and Joseph Stalin made it clear to the head of the International, Georgi Dimitrov, that Chiang was irreplaceable. Without him China might fall apart or fall into the hands of men ready to come to terms with Japan. Chiang’s most likely successor was Wang Jingwei, who happened to be in Europe at the time, talking to the Germans. The USSR, threatened by Japan in the Far East, needed a strong China. On 16 December the International instructed the communists to bring about a peaceful settlement. The party leadership had already changed course, having understood Moscow’s position from its press, and the call for Chiang to be tried was withdrawn as “inappropriate”.

Zhou Enlai arrived in Xi’an on 17 December. He found a tense situation: Yang and the young officers of the secret Comrades’ Association against Japan wanted to kill Chiang, while Zhang wanted to release him on condition that he accepted at least some of the demands. Zhou persuaded them that Chiang was worth more alive than dead. Earlier the Australian William Henry Donald, formerly Zhang’s adviser and now Chiang’s, had flown in to Xi’an and persuaded the prisoner to move to more comfortable quarters. On 20 December Soong Mei-ling’s brother, the financier Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), arrived by air, and on 22 December Soong Mei-ling herself, accompanied by the head of military intelligence, Dai Li. It was she who persuaded her husband to talk. On 23 and 24 December Zhou, Song Ziwen, Soong Mei-ling, Zhang and Yang agreed the terms orally: a halt to the fighting against the Red Army and the withdrawal of central troops from the north-west, the reorganisation of the government and the removal from it of men inclined to come to terms with Japan, the release of imprisoned activists, preparations for resistance and cooperation with the USSR. On the evening of 24 December Chiang received Zhou Enlai, who ten years earlier had served under him at the Whampoa Military Academy. He promised to end the war with the communists and agreed that Zhou should later come to Nanjing for talks. He signed nothing.

On the afternoon of 25 December Zhang, against the advice of Zhou and Yang, boarded an aircraft with Chiang and Soong Mei-ling. He wanted to show that he had not acted for the sake of power and to place himself at the government’s disposal. After a night in Luoyang, Chiang landed in Nanjing on 26 December, where cheering crowds greeted him. Zhang was detained at once.

The long shadow of Xi’an

On 31 December 1936 a military court sentenced Zhang to ten years’ imprisonment for mutiny. A few days later the government pardoned him but placed him under the “strict supervision” of the Military Commission. He remained Chiang’s prisoner throughout the war with Japan and the civil war; in 1946 he was taken to Taiwan, and he regained full freedom only in 1990, after the deaths of Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo. He died in Honolulu in 2001, aged a hundred. Yang Hucheng was forced to go abroad in 1937. When he returned after the outbreak of war to fight in it, he was arrested. He was held prisoner for twelve years, and in September 1949, shortly before the fall of Chongqing, Kuomintang agents murdered him together with his son and his young daughter. The Northeastern Army was broken up and moved to other provinces, and some of its radical officers went over to the communists.

Xi’an brought Chiang a popularity he had never enjoyed before. He returned as a national hero, a symbol of the country’s unity. The war against the communists, however, was over. Government troops never again moved against Shaanxi, and in 1937 talks on a united front began. Historians disagree about how great a change this was. Older works called Xi’an a turning point in modern Chinese history. More recent ones, such as those of Parks Coble and Rana Mitter, point out that Chiang had already been preparing for war with Japan, and that the terms agreed in Xi’an differed little from those that had been discussed in secret talks with the communists for months. Hans van de Ven believes that what mattered most was that both Chiang and the communists came through the crisis intact, although both had been close to ruin. In Kuomintang tradition, Xi’an was the moment when Chiang was robbed of victory over the communists. For the Chinese Communist Party it is proof of its patriotism, and in the People’s Republic of China Zhang and Yang are regarded as national heroes.

For the road to the Second World War, Xi’an meant one thing: China stopped giving way. When in July 1937 a clash with the Japanese took place at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, Chiang’s government could not, and would not, retreat as it had in 1931 and 1933. The Japanese military, who were counting on another quick local war, became entangled in the Second Sino-Japanese War, from which they could not extricate themselves. It was this war that in the following years pushed Japan towards war with the Western powers. The communists, saved at Xi’an, emerged from that war many times stronger than they had entered it.