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16 The Shanghai Incident As long as the major fighting between the Chinese and the Japanese was confined to Manchuria, an area beyond the protective sphere of the Navy, Admiral Taylor and the Asiatic Fleet followed their usual routine, retiring for the winter of 1931–1932 to the Philippines and leaving in Chinese waters the gunboats of the Yangtze and South China patrols, the destroyer Truxtun tied to the naval buoy at Shanghai, and another destroyer , Simpson, in the river before Nanking. The Navy thus avoided any suspicion of confrontation with the Japanese in northern waters. This outward show of noninvolvement abruptly ended in late January 1932 with the outbreak of fighting between Chinese and Japanese at Shanghai in the so-called Shanghai Incident. Antagonism had been growing between the Chinese and Japanese at Shanghai since the Chinese and Korean farmers had clashed at Chien Tao in Manchuria the previous July, an outbreak that was followed by wideranging attacks on Chinese in Korea. Chinese hostility against the Japanese intensified still further after the movement by the Kwantung Army into Manchuria on 18 September. An anti-Japanese society, the National Salvation Association, was established in September 1931 to promote a boycott of Japanese trade, strikes in Japanese mills, seizure of Japanese goods, and the halting of services to the Japanese community. Numbering perhaps twenty-five thousand persons, the Japanese in Shanghai for the most part were concentrated in the northern district of Hongkew, along a salient extending beyond the northern boundary of the International Settlement to Hongkew Park, and in the neighboring Chinese district of Chapei. Rear Admiral Shiozawa Koichi, commander of the First Expeditionary Fleet, flew his flag from Ataka tied to the Japanese buoy before the Shanghai Bund. Admiral Shiozawa was a small but forceful officer who even before the Shanghai Incident had won the gratitude of the Japanese community by putting small landing forces ashore to halt Chinese depredations. There was increasing ill feeling between the Japanese navy and the consulate general, as the navy tended to press a positive line while the consulate general sought to preserve harmony with the Chinese . The Chinese military at Shanghai was represented by the Nineteenth Route Army, a force of about twenty thousand men from the southern provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. The Nineteenth Route Army had been brought to Shanghai at least in part to provide support for Cantonese leaders such as Sun Fo and Eugene Chen, who had assumed nominal direction of the Nanking government after Chiang Kai-shek had been forced into nominal retirement the previous month. Even as the Shanghai Incident was breaking out, however, the Cantonese-dominated government collapsed and a new regime was formed in which Chiang Kai-shek came back as supreme commander, the moderate Wang Ching-wei became president of the Executive Yuan, and the brilliant American-educated economist T. V. Soong served as vice president of the Executive Yuan and minister of finance. The return to power of Chiang 246 / Part III. The U.S. Navy and the Confrontation between China and Japan Kai-shek and T. V. Soong was likely to inspire confidence among the Americans and other westerners. The mayor of Greater Shanghai, Chinese Shanghai outside the settlements, was General Wu Te-chen, a Cantonese and friend of Chiang Kai-shek. Wu Te-chen skillfully provided continuity in Chinese political leadership at Shanghai, when the municipal government as well as the Nationalist government at Nanking was in serious disarray. The highly volatile situation at Shanghai in January 1932 required only a spark to ignite an explosion. On 9 January, the day after Emperor Hirohito narrowly escaped assassination , the Kuomintang daily of Shanghai, Minkuo Jipao, made a disparaging remark about the “august” emperor so infuriating to the local Japanese that Mayor Wu was forced to apologize. Nine days later, five Japanese strolling in Chapei, two of them Nichiren monks, were attacked by men who appeared to be armed Chinese. Two of the Japanese, including one of the monks, later died. Unknown at the time, the attack had been organized by a Japanese agent provocateur who deliberately sought to create an incident, rather as young officers of the Kwantung Army had provoked an incident the previous September by planting a bomb on the South Manchurian Railway tracks. Two days later a gang of young roughs from the Japanese Youth League replied by attacking the San Yu towel factory from which it was believed the attackers on the five strolling Japanese had emerged...

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