Disunity and Foreign Conflict: Chiang Kai-shek and the 1931 Mukden Incident

• In Event: Historical Processes and Turning Points in International Relations

Abstract

In 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education decided to expand the timeline of the War against Japanese Aggression from eight to fourteen years with primary and secondary education textbooks now declaring the Mukden Incident in 1931 (instead of the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident) as the start of the war. This change in the textbook is significant because the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has signaled his willingness to embrace the Chinese Communist Party’s and Mao Zedong’s archrival Chiang Kai-shek as part of the national history of the People’s Republic of China. Yet the received wisdom about the earlier Chinese leader’s handling of the Mukden Incident has been routinely criticized for being self-serving and weak. This paper, which constitutes a chapter in a larger book project, revisits Chiang’s response to the Japanese incursion into Manchuria in 1931 to highlight the kinds of cultural tools leaders can wield to sustain their legitimacy in periods of intense internal and external strife.

The unity Chiang had hoped to accomplish through the Northern Expedition in 1928 had proven to be a mirage. Warlords with whom Chiang had allied to complete the expedition had turned against him, and a series of civil wars had ensued. The Chinese Communists also continued to pose a threat, and in October 1930, Chiang began the first of his annihilation campaigns intended to rout them out. Even within Chiang’s own party, his leadership was challenged by a Guangdong faction that in May 1931 proclaimed to the world that it, not the Nanjing government, was the legitimate center of authority in China. Taking advantage of China’s disunity, in September the Japanese Guandong army was emboldened to invade Mukden and within five months occupied all of Manchuria.

The received wisdom about Chiang’s response to the Mukden Incident was that he pursued a policy of “internal pacification before external resistance.” Because Chiang was determined to unify China under his authority, he had ordered that the Chinese to offer no military resistance to the Japanese, which made it easy for the Japanese to overrun northeastern China. The problem with this approach was that Chiang alienated many groups in China, especially students, who thought that the appropriate response was to resist. In refusing to take advantage of this nationalism, Chiang ended up overseeing a deficient conservative administration that lacked a social program for the people.

This conventional analysis gives little agency to Chiang’s leadership. After criticizing the defects in Chiang’s nonmilitary resistance approach, it also acknowledges that China’s military weakness and disunity would have boded ill for China and for Chiang’s leadership. My goal is to lay out Chiang’s alternative path, which is more complicated than the “internal pacification, then external resistance.” Specifically, I argue that Chiang had instigated a plan three years earlier that deployed a powerful cultural tool in the form of enduring humiliations for the sake of accomplishing a greater purpose. And yet, Chiang only deployed this cultural tool in the face of what he perceived to be unwinnable military incursions by the Japanese. Outside of these events, in fact, Chiang was actively finding ways to lessen imperial influence while at the same time building the case that he should be the legitimate leader of China.

What comes to light is a fascinating story about a Chinese leader’s wielding of chi as both shame (to confront the internal chaos) and humiliation (to confront external threats). It speaks to a mode of governance that Chiang forged during a chaotic and tumultuous period in Chinese history that withstood popular protest. It behooves us to understand his politics of shame and humiliation as some of these tactics (authoritarian in not the best word to describe them) can be seen in the current Chinese leadership.

Author

• Grace C. Huang, St. Lawrence University