A few shots were fired near the west bank of the Yungding River at midnight 60 years ago last Saturday.Nobody knew for certain who fired the shots.But a Japanese rifle company in a field exercise near the Marco Polo Bridge, which spanned the river, thought it was fired upon.A private was reported missing, and so the company commander asked this battalion commander, Major Kiyonao Ichinogi, what to do.Ichinogi requested instructions from his regimental commander, Colonel Yasunari Mutaguchi.The colonel ordered the battalion to besiege the garrisoned county seat of Wanping near Beijing.Ichinogi was asked to demand the Chinese garrison withdraw from the county.
One may wonder why the Japanese were able to have their troops conduct field exercises in China.It is the Boxer Protocol that gave them the rights to do so.Strictly speaking, the Japanese claim to the right of field exercises under the Protocol was untenable.While Article 9 of the Protocol provided 12 places between the Chinese capital and Shanhaikuan for the stationing of fixed numbers of foreign troops – 1,350 each for Britain, France, Germany and Japan, 500 for Italy and 300 for Russia – the Marco Polo Bridge and Wanping were not among them.The Japanese garrison by July 1937 had quadrupled the allotted figure.Not only were the Protocol stipulations violated, but the Japanese had deviated from the precedents.Foreign powers in the past generally had held exercises in the Shanhakuan area – the farthest from Beijing to avoid irritating Chinese sensibilities.Moreover, the very applicability of the Protocol in 1937 was doubtful from the legal standpoint, since the Chinese capital had moved from Beijing to Nanjing.
When the garrison refused, the Japanese attacked before sunrise on July 8.They occupied Wanping at 4:30 a.m.By then the missing soldier had already returned to the line.He had earlier left to answer a call of nature and missed the roll call.The company commander wasn’t told of the return of the private after the attack on Wanping had begun.
The curtain was raised for the July 7 Incident, better known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident that soon engulfed the whole of China in an all-out war of resistance against Japanese aggression that came to an end as part of World War II only after Tokyo unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945.
Negotiations started at once to end hostilities at Wanping.The Japanese demanded General Song Zheyuan, commander of the Twenty-ninth Army, to withdraw the garrison to the west bank of the river so that they might control the county.With the approval of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek at Nanjing, Song signed a truce agreement on July 11.On that day, however, the cabinet of Prince Fumimaro Konoe decided to dispatch large reinforcements to Beijing.Konoe named the hostilities the North China Incident.
That decision forced Chiang to declare the agreement null on the following day.The Nanjing government, having committed itself to a united front with the Chinese Communists against Japanese aggression, was determined to fight.On July 17, Chiang announced at Lushan that China desired peace but not at all costs.China did not seek war. But if the war was thrust upon it, he said, China had no choice but to fight to the end, with no thought of compromise.
In the meantime, Japanese reinforcements reached north China and a general attack was launched on Beijing and Tianjin on July 28.Beijing was made an open city, and Tianjin fell on the same day.On the following day, Tokyo decided to send three more infantry divisions from Japan under the pretext that they were needed for “self-defense” against Chinese counterattacks.
The undeclared war escalated.On August 13, the Japanese opened a second front in Shanghai.Chiang threw in two of his best German-trained divisions that stalled the Japanese advance to Nanjing for three months.Japanese bombers flew across the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea to bombard Nanjing, Hangzhou and Nanzhang for three days in a row from August 14 to 16.Tokyo renamed the undeclared war the China Incident on September 2.
On October 10, an amphibious operation took place to land three divisions near Hangzhou to attack Shanghai from the south. This tactic of outflanking the defenders worked, causing an unexpectedly rapid disintegration of the Chinese defenses.The road to Nanjing was left wide open.
At this point, Germany offered mediation.Berlin instructed its ambassador in Nanjing, Oscar P. Trautmann, to forward a Japanese proposal of peace to Chiang Kai-shek in November.Japan demanded autonomy for Inner Mongolia; an extension of the demilitarized zone in North China, where China could retain its administrative power but not appoint anti-Japanese officials; an expansion of the demilitarized zone at Shanghai; termination of anti-Japanese activities in China; and effective measures against communism in China and customs revision in favor of Japan.
Chiang was advised by his generals to consider the peace terms seriously, but so swift was the Japanese juggernaut that Nanjng fell on December 12 – only a little more than five months after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred – before any diplomatic talks took place.The Japanese militarists, who boasted they could finish the war in three months, now demanded that Tokyo discontinue the negotiations or revise the terms.On December 20, the Japanese made a second proposal through Trautmann.They demanded China join with Japan and Manchukuo in an anti-communist front, pay reparations, sign a treaty of economic cooperation and accept demilitarized zones with autonomous agencies in them.The second proposal was an ultimatum.As Chiang weighed the various alternatives and delayed his decision the Japanese made an even harsher third proposal of nine points, which the German envoy hesitated to forward.Meanwhile, Chiang had independently come to the decision to reject the peace overture.He moved his capital to Zhongqing in Sizhuan.The full-scale war of resistance began.
China did not declare war on Japan until after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.
Chiang Kai-shek met President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain at Cairo from November 22 through 26 to discuss the future prosecution of the war against Japan.Their major political decision was enunciated in the historic Cairo Declaration, issued after the conclusion of their conference but made public on December 1.The decision affecting Taiwan reads: “It is their (the three leaders’) purpose … that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China.”
The promise of the Cairo declaration was reiterated in the final wartime pronouncement of the Allied leaders at Potsdam on July 26, 1945.President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, “with the full concurrence of President Chiang Kai-shek” who was not present, issued the Potsdam Declaration.“The terms of the Cairo Declaration,” it was stated in Article 9, “shall be carried out.”Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration to surrender.
Japan renounced Formosa and the Pescadores or Taiwan and Penghu in the Peace Treaty of San Francisco in 1951.Tokyo did not state to whom Taiwan and Penghu would be returned.Neither the Republic of China nor the People’s Republic of China took part in the San Fransisco Peace Conference.It was up to Tokyo to sign a separate treaty of peace with either Taipei or Beijing.At the urging of the United States, Japan chose to sign it in Taipei with the Republic of China.The peace treaty was signed on April 28, 1952.It went into effect on August 5.In that treaty Japan renounced Taiwan and Penghu but did specify to whom they would revert.But by opting to sign the treaty, Japan agreed in effect to return both to the Republic of China.
Long before the signing of the treaty, Chiang Kai-shek, who was commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in the China-India-Burma theater, received General Order No. 1 from General Douglas A. MacArthur to accept the surrender of the Japanese army in Taiwan.MacArthur was the supreme commander of the Allied forces in occupied Japan.Chiang sent Chen Yi to Taipei to accept the instrument of surrender from General Rikichi Ando, Japanese governor-general of Taiwan, on October 25, 1945.Taiwan was formally taken over after 50 years of Japanese rule.By uti possidetis, Taiwan and Penghu belong to the Republic of China.
Uti possidetis – as you (now) possess – is a principle in international law that a conclusion of treaty of peace between belligerents vests in them respectively as absolute property the territory under their effectual control and the things attached to it and the movables then in their possession except as otherwise stipulated.The peace treaty of Taipei did not otherwise stipulate.
（本文刊載於96.07.09 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
