Xi'an Incident

• 1. Introduction

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  The Xi'an Incident began in the early hours of the 12th of December 1936, when a Chinese general sent hundreds of soldiers to storm a resort complex in Lintong, about ten miles outside Xi'an. Their target was one of the most powerful men in Asia. Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo of China's Nationalist government, fled out of his window in a panic, scaled a wall, injured his back in the fall, and scrambled up a snow-covered mountain without his false teeth or one of his shoes. When soldiers found him hours later, he was shivering and exhausted. The captain of the arresting guard carried him down the mountain on his back.

  This was not a foreign invasion or a Communist uprising. The men who ordered the arrest were Chiang's own generals: Zhang Xueliang, who had once governed Manchuria before Japan seized it, and Yang Hucheng, a warlord from the northwest. Their demand was a simple one: stop fighting the Communists and fight the Japanese instead. What followed in the next two weeks would shape the course of the Second World War in Asia, determine the fate of China's civil war, and reverberate for decades afterward. How did two of Chiang's generals come to arrest the leader of their own government? What did Stalin have to do with the outcome? And what happened to the men who started it all?

• 2. Disease of the Heart

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  Chiang Kai-shek's governing philosophy toward Japan was captured in a phrase he reportedly used: "The Japanese are a disease of the skin. The Communists are a disease of the heart." When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, he ordered General Zhang Xueliang, whose family had ruled the region, not to resist. His priority was winning the civil war first, a policy he called "first internal pacification, then external resistance."

  The Chinese Communist Party had a different interpretation. They saw Chiang's nonresistance as evidence he was a pawn of the Japanese, and called for "Resisting Japan and Opposing Chiang." But pressure was building on both sides to reconsider. By late 1932, Communist guerilla groups in Manchuria were already cooperating with Nationalist guerillas against Japanese occupiers in the field. The Soviet Union began pushing Communist parties worldwide to form united fronts against fascism, a policy formally adopted by the 7th World Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1935.

  The CCP's own position shifted at a conference at Wayaobu, where they published a manifesto calling for "the most broad national united front" against Japan. They were willing to suspend class conflict to achieve it. But they were not willing to disarm. Their plan centered on expanding the Chinese Red Army to one million men and dramatically increasing the territory of the Chinese Soviet Republic. The gap between what the CCP wanted and what Chiang would accept was already enormous before either side had sat down to talk.

• 3. The Northwest Alliance

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  Zhang Xueliang's Northeastern Army, garrisoned in Xi'an, was 130,000 strong. Yang Hucheng commanded the 40,000-strong Northwestern Army based in the same city. Both had been assigned to wipe out the Communist remnants that arrived in northern Shaanxi at the end of the Long March in October 1935. The CCP had lost over 90 percent of its numbers on that march and was desperately short of supplies.

  The expected easy victory never came. The Red Army defeated both forces in several engagements, then treated its prisoners well and gave them a political education before releasing them to spread the message that the Communists wanted an anti-Japanese alliance. The pitch landed. Zhang had watched Japan seize his homeland. He resented being ordered to fight fellow Chinese instead of the occupiers. Yang had grown skeptical of Chiang's commitment after Chiang suppressed anti-Japanese demonstrations in December 1935.

  Yang concluded a secret ceasefire with the CCP first, using an officer named Nan Hanchen as intermediary. Zhang took longer. A key moment came when a central government emissary, Dong Jianwu, asked for passage to CCP territory, revealing that Nanjing was already negotiating with the Communists. Zhang concluded that if Chiang could negotiate, so could he. By the 25th of February 1936, Zhang had agreed to a temporary ceasefire. On the 9th of April, Zhou Enlai arrived at Zhang's headquarters in Xi'an to formalize the agreement. Zhou also secured supplies for the Red Army in the process.

  By September, a formal alliance was in place. Yan Xishan, the warlord governing Shanxi, concluded his own secret agreements with the CCP in June 1936, driven by Japanese encroachment on his territory. These three commanders staged fake military battles to keep Nanjing from learning of their arrangement. The northwest alliance was built entirely in the shadows.

• 4. Stalled Negotiations

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  Chiang Kai-shek had also been reaching out to the CCP privately, despite his public posture. Two figures in the Nationalist government, Soong Ching-ling and Chen Lifu, helped recruit Communist underground contacts to carry the message across the front line, and they arrived at the CCP on the 27th of February 1936. The CCP responded in March with five conditions: a ceasefire, a government where Communists and Nationalists were equal partners, a military alliance with the Red Army remaining independent, the right to relocate to Hebei, and political and economic reforms.

  The Nationalists countered in June with a fundamentally different vision. They wanted the Red Army fully absorbed into the national military, relocated to Suiyuan and Chahar rather than Hebei, and the CCP to formally recognize Nationalist authority. Both sides continued talking because neither was satisfied with the alternative. Then, in late June, the CCP re-established radio contact with Moscow and learned that the Comintern had sharply criticized their plan for a northwest anti-Chiang base as unrealistic. A Comintern telegram on the 15th of August ordered them to seek a united front under Chiang's leadership. The CCP adopted the new slogan "compelling Chiang to resist Japan" and sent a secret agent, Pan Hannian, to resume talks in Nanjing.

  By the time Pan met with Chiang's advisor Chen Lifu, the military situation had swung in Chiang's favor. Nationalist-allied cavalry had intercepted a Communist resupply mission and cut two Red Army corps to pieces. The terms Chen presented in early November were extraordinarily harsh: reduce the Red Army to 3,000 men and send all senior officers into exile. Pan called them "conditions for surrender" and refused. On the 10th of December, the CCP recalled him from Nanjing. At this point Chiang was pressing ahead with preparations for a sixth encirclement campaign against the Communists.

• 5. Arrest at Huaqing Pool

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  Chiang arrived at the Huaqing Pool complex in Lintong on the 4th of December 1936 to prepare for another campaign against the Communists. He was aware from intelligence reports that Zhang had been in contact with the Communists, but he did not believe he was in danger. At a meeting with Zhang and Yang, he shouted: "I am the Generalissimo; I do not err; I am China; and China cannot do well without me." On the 9th of December, he threatened both generals with removal from command and reassignment of their armies to distant provinces if they refused to attack.

  That same day, tens of thousands of students arrived in Lintong to demonstrate for a united front. Chiang demanded that Zhang disperse them or he would have guards open fire. Zhang promised the students "a definite reply in action within one week." The meeting was, historian Rana Mitter suggests, likely the moment Zhang decided to act. At 10 PM on the night of the 11th, Zhang ordered Sun Mingjiu, his personal guard captain, to arrest Chiang and bring him in unharmed.

  At 5 AM on the 12th of December, Sun led several hundred soldiers to the Huaqing Pool complex. They reached the gate at 6 AM, could not give the password, and opened fire. Chiang woke to the firefight, jumped from his window, scaled the compound wall injuring his back, and fled without shoes or his false teeth up a snow-covered mountainside. Sun's soldiers found him hours later, shivering and exhausted, and Sun carried him down on his back. Yang's Northwestern Army simultaneously seized the government headquarters, the airport, the police station, and the Western Capital Hotel in Xi'an, where Chiang's associates were staying. Among those killed in the operation was Shao Yuanchong, one of the authors of the Republic of China's national anthem, who was shot trying to escape from the hotel and died in the hospital two days later.

• 6. Stalin Decides

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  Moscow received news of Chiang's arrest on the 13th of December. Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, was initially delighted and was preparing to authorize Chiang's execution. He changed course after reading Soviet newspapers. Both Pravda and Izvestia had run articles condemning the Xi'an Incident as a plot by "pro-Japanese elements." In a subsequent meeting, Stalin made clear he viewed Chiang as indispensable.

  Stalin's reasoning was geopolitical. Without Chiang, China might fall to the Japanese or align with them. Chiang's most likely successor was the former premier Wang Jingwei, who had just met with Adolf Hitler to discuss China joining the Anti-Comintern Pact and was not even in China in December 1936. Stalin also had reasons to distrust Zhang Xueliang specifically. Zhang's father had been a close ally of Japan. Zhang himself had commanded Chinese forces against the Soviet Union during the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict. And only months before Xi'an, a similar revolt by Chinese generals opposed to Chiang's appeasement policies had been revealed to have covert Japanese backing. The Comintern sent the CCP a telegram on the 16th of December ordering a peaceful resolution. It was not received until the 17th and took several more days to fully decrypt, but by then CCP leaders had already read Moscow's position in public news sources and changed course on their own. On the 17th, the CCP announced they desired a peaceful settlement. On the 18th, they publicly described their earlier call for Chiang's public trial as "inappropriate."

  The CCP's reversal left Zhang in a precarious position: a faction in his own camp, including radical officers of the "Anti-Japanese Comrade Society" and Yang Hucheng himself, still wanted Chiang executed. Zhou Enlai, who arrived in Xi'an on the night of the 17th, spent an entire night convincing them that Chiang should be released safely, provided the central government did not start a civil war.

• 7. Negotiations and Release

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  The Australian journalist William Henry Donald arrived in Xi'an on the 14th of December and quickly became a bridging figure. He had previously advised Zhang and was a current advisor to Chiang. He persuaded Chiang to accept better lodgings at the house of Gao Guizi, opening a small channel of communication. Donald also warned the mutiny's leaders that holding Chiang hostage would turn Chinese public opinion against them.

  T. V. Soong, Chiang's brother-in-law and a leading Chinese banker, flew to Xi'an on the 20th of December after confirming Chiang was alive. He could not initially move Chiang to negotiate and returned to Nanjing. On the 22nd of December, he returned with his sister Soong Mei-ling and the military intelligence chief Dai Li. Chiang's wife succeeded where others had failed. Chiang refused to sign anything but verbally agreed to reshuffle the government, hold a national salvation conference three months later, reorganize the Nationalist party, and approve an alliance with the Soviet Union and cooperation with the Communist party.

  On the 24th of December, Chiang received Zhou Enlai. It was the first time the two men had seen each other since Zhou had left the Whampoa Military Academy more than ten years earlier. Zhou opened with a personal remark: "In the ten years since we have met, you seem to have aged very little." Chiang replied that Zhou had once been his subordinate and should do what he was told. Zhou answered that if Chiang halted the civil war and fought Japan, the Red Army would willingly accept his command. Chiang agreed to the terms negotiated that day.

  On the 25th of December, Zhang released Chiang and, without telling Zhou, chose to accompany him personally to Nanjing. Zhou's reaction, when he learned Chiang was already leaving, was terse: "This is bad! Bad!" Zhang, Chiang, and Soong Mei-ling took off around 5 PM and arrived in Nanjing the following day. No written agreement had ever been signed.

• 8. Aftermath and Legacy

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  Chiang arrived in Nanjing to cheering crowds of over 400,000 people. The American journalist Edgar Snow wrote that Chiang had returned with a national standing "higher than that of any leader in modern Chinese history." Zhang Xueliang was arrested the same day he landed, court-martialed on the 31st of December on charges of treason, sentenced to ten years in prison, then had that sentence commuted to house arrest. He remained under house arrest for over 50 years, until 1990, outliving both Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang's son Chiang Ching-kuo.

  Yang Hucheng's fate was grimmer. He was forced into exile and voluntarily returned to China in November 1937, only to be immediately arrested. He was executed in Chongqing in September 1949, shortly before the city fell to the Communist forces. The Northeastern Army, meanwhile, was surrounded by 37 Nationalist divisions. Its five most senior generals chose to surrender peacefully, led by Wang Yizhe. Radical officers in the Anti-Japanese Comrade Society assassinated Wang Yizhe on the 2nd of February. They confronted Zhou Enlai as well, threatening to kill him for what they called his betrayal of Zhang Xueliang. Zhou talked them down. The remaining army was broken into separate units and dispersed to Hebei, Hunan, and Anhui.

  The Second United Front that the incident set in motion was not formally enacted until late September, several months after the Second Sino-Japanese War had already begun. Nationalists and their historians on Taiwan long maintained that Xi'an destroyed their chance to finish off the CCP. CCP historiography celebrated it as proof of the party's commitment to national salvation. Revisionist historians, writing from the 1990s onward, have pushed back on both readings. Rana Mitter notes that the terms agreed to at Xi'an differed little from the deal that was already taking shape before the coup. Parks Coble argues the basic concepts of Nationalist policy did not change. Hans van de Ven suggests the incident's main significance was simply that both the CCP and Chiang survived at all.

  At the spot on the mountain where Zhang's soldiers found Chiang, the Nationalist government built a monument called the "National Resurrection Pavilion." After 1949 it was renamed the "Seizing Chiang Pavilion." In the 1980s it was renamed again to the "Bingjian Pavilion," after the ancient concept of arresting a ruler to force a change in policy, which Zhang had found so compelling when Yang Hucheng first proposed it. The site was included in China's Second Batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level in 1982 and remains a popular tourist destination.