January 28 incident

• 1. Introduction

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  The January 28 incident began not with a declaration of war but with five Buddhist monks chanting on an alms round through the streets of Shanghai. On the 18th of January 1932, they were beaten by agitated Chinese civilians near the Sanyou Factory. Two were seriously injured. One died. Within hours, a Japanese group burned the factory to the ground, killing two Chinese workers inside. What followed was a conflict that historians now regard as the first modern war fought in a large city between two heavily equipped armies. The January 28 incident, also called the Shanghai incident, ran from the 28th of January to the 3rd of March 1932, drawing in the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan across the crowded districts of one of Asia's busiest international ports. It planted questions that would define the decade ahead: How far would Japan push? How long could China hold? And what would the world's great powers actually do when war arrived at their doorstep?

• 2. The Conspiracy Behind the Monks

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  Major Tanaka Ryukichi of the Kwantung Army did not stumble into the crisis. He engineered it. His intention was to use the volatile conditions of Shanghai, where Japanese businesses, residents, and international observers were concentrated, as a deliberate distraction from Japanese military operations in north Manchuria. A military intervention by the Japanese navy in Shanghai's international city would pull global attention away from his colleagues' actions in the region they had already seized following the Mukden Incident. Tanaka later admitted, during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and in his postwar memoirs, that he had paid the Chinese mob to attack the Buddhist monks. The beating was not spontaneous. It was purchased. The editorial that preceded it had already inflamed the situation. On the 9th of January, a semi-official Kuomintang newspaper called the Min-kuo Jih-pao described a failed assassination attempt on Emperor Hirohito as merely "unfortunate." Japanese residents in Shanghai received this as a direct insult to their national honor. By the time the monks were attacked nine days later, the atmosphere was already combustible.

• 3. A City Under Pressure

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  By the 22nd of January, Admiral Shiozawa of the Japanese Navy and Consul General Murai had issued formal demands to Shanghai Mayor Wu: disband anti-Japanese societies and end boycott activities. Representatives of Japanese conglomerates lodged parallel complaints with the Municipal Council of the Shanghai International Settlement. They wanted an apology, punishment for the attackers, and an end to the protests against Japanese goods that had spread through Shanghai and Guangzhou following Japan's seizure of Manchuria. General Cai Tingkai, commanding the Chinese 19th Route Army, held an emergency meeting with his colleagues on the 23rd of January. They had watched the Kwantung Army move through Manchuria without effective opposition. They vowed to resist any Japanese naval invasion of Shanghai at all costs. The Nanjing government, for its part, had implemented no policy. It was the officers themselves who made the decision. By the 27th of January, the Japanese military had massed roughly 30 ships, several seaplanes, and nearly 2,000 troops along Shanghai's shoreline, officially justified as protection for Japanese citizens and property.

• 4. The Night of January 28

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  Shortly before midnight on the 28th of January, plainclothes Chinese troops who had slipped into the Hongkou district opened fire on Japanese sailors leaving their headquarters. Three thousand Japanese sailors mobilized in response, attacking the neighboring district of Zhabei. The 19th Route Army, which many observers had expected to withdraw after receiving a substantial payment from Shanghai to avoid provoking a Japanese attack, instead put up fierce resistance. The same day, the Chinese Air Force sent nine planes to the Hongqiao Aerodrome. The first aerial battle between Chinese and Japanese aircraft took place that day, though neither side suffered losses in the exchange. The Shanghai Municipal Council had agreed just hours earlier that afternoon to Japan's ultimatum demanding public condemnation and monetary compensation for the monk incident. Their compliance did not stop the fighting. The conflict spread outward from Hongkou and Zhabei toward Wusong and Jiangwan. The Commercial Press and the Oriental Library were destroyed. Residents of the Shanghai International Settlement could stand on the banks of Suzhou Creek and watch the fighting unfold. Some even visited the battle lines directly, shielded by the legal protection of extraterritoriality.

• 5. Escalation and Stalemate

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  On the 30th of January, Chiang Kai-shek moved the national capital from Nanjing to Luoyang. Nanjing's geographic proximity to Shanghai made it vulnerable if the fighting spread. The United States, the United Kingdom, and France all attempted to negotiate a ceasefire; an initial agreement was brokered but quickly collapsed, with each side accusing the other of firing first. On the 12th of February, American, British, and French representatives managed to arrange a half-day ceasefire for humanitarian relief to civilians trapped in the crossfire. Japan then issued a fresh ultimatum demanding that Chinese forces pull back 20 kilometers from the boundaries of the Shanghai concessions. China rejected it outright, and the fighting in Hongkou intensified. Japanese forces could not take the city by mid-February. Reinforcements followed: the Japanese 9th Infantry Division and the IJA 24th Mixed Brigade arrived, pushing total Japanese strength to nearly 18,000 troops, backed by warships and aircraft. On the 14th of February, Chiang responded by sending the 5th Army, including the 87th and 88th divisions, into Shanghai.

• 6. The Fall and the Ceasefire

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  On the 20th of February, Japanese bombardments intensified around Miaohang, and commercial and residential districts of the city caught fire. The Chinese defenders numbered nearly five divisions, but without naval or armored support, their positions eroded quickly. On the 28th of February, after a week of fighting marked by the stubborn resistance of troops largely from Guangdong, the Japanese 9th Division captured the village of Jiangwan, north of Shanghai. On the 1st of March, the advance contingent of the Japanese 11th Infantry Division landed near Liuhe, behind Chinese lines. A desperate counterattack failed to dislodge them. Surrounded and outflanked, Chinese forces abandoned Shanghai and the surrounding area. The Japanese Commander ordered a halt to the fighting on the 3rd of March. The League of Nations passed a ceasefire resolution on the 4th of March, though sporadic fighting continued. On the 6th of March, China unilaterally agreed to stop fighting; Japan rejected the ceasefire. League of Nations representatives arrived on the 14th of March to broker negotiations. On the 5th of May, China and Japan signed the Shanghai Ceasefire Agreement, which made Shanghai a demilitarized zone and barred China from stationing troops in areas around Shanghai, Suzhou, and Kunshan, while Japan retained a small military presence in the city.

• 7. Aftermath and Assassination

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  The ceasefire reordered the fates of everyone it touched. The 19th Route Army was reassigned by Chiang Kai-shek to fight Communist insurgents in Fujian. After winning some of those battles, their leadership broke with the Kuomintang entirely. On the 22nd of November, the commanders of the 19th Route Army established the Fujian People's Government, declaring independence from the Republic of China. Neither all elements of the Communist movement nor the Nationalist government backed it. Chiang's armies crushed the new government in January 1934. The leaders fled to Hong Kong; the rest of the army was dissolved and absorbed into other units of the National Revolutionary Army. In Tokyo, the incident carried a different kind of consequence. The violence had helped erode civilian control over the military. Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated on the 15th of May 1932. The commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, Yoshinori Shirakawa, was severely wounded at a birthday celebration for Emperor Hirohito held at Shanghai's Hongkou Park by Korean nationalist Yoon Bong-Gil. Shirakawa died of those wounds on the 26th of May. Historians now read the January 28 incident as a preview of urban warfare on a modern scale, and its shadow stretched directly to the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, which Japan itself called the Second Shanghai Incident.