Mukden Incident

In 1927 Japan held the “Eastern Conference”, which set a policy of separating Manchuria and Mongolia from China. On the night of 18 September 1931 Japan's Kwantung Army blew up a section of the South Manchuria Railway near Liutiaohu on the northern outskirts of Shenyang, falsely blaming Chinese troops, and used this as a pretext for a surprise attack on the Northeast Army's Beidaying barracks and for shelling Shenyang. Because Chiang Kai-shek held to the policy of “first internal pacification, then resistance to foreign aggression”, the Northeast Army was ordered not to resist and its main force withdrew inside the Great Wall; Japanese troops took Shenyang the next day. They then swiftly occupied Jilin and Heilongjiang, and by February 1932 all three northeastern provinces had fallen, leaving over thirty million compatriots under occupation. The incident was the start of Japan's war of aggression against China, and of China's partial resistance. Northeastern soldiers and civilians rose up: Ma Zhanshan's troops fought the Japanese at the Heilongjiang (Nenjiang) Bridge; patriotic officers, soldiers and civilians formed anti-Japanese forces such as the Northeast Volunteer Armies, and the Communist Party later organized the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, in which heroes such as Yang Jingyu, Zhao Yiman and Zhao Shangzhi carried on a long, hard struggle. A national movement to resist Japan and save the nation arose, with student strikes and petitions, workers' strikes and merchants' boycotts of Japanese goods. The League of Nations sent the Lytton Commission; its report recognized the Northeast as Chinese territory but also proposed “international joint administration”.