Introduction
The Jinan Incident, a military conflict between China and Japan that took place in May 1928, has not received much scholarly attention since it is commonly regarded as a local clash that had a limited impact on Sino-Japanese relations. However, the circumstances surrounding the Incident are more complex than has generally been realized. This paper aims to introduce a new dimension to research into the event. It examines the confrontation between China and Japan over the Incident through the lens of the English-language papers in China's treaty ports. By analysing the efficiency of Japan's propaganda and China's deficient response, I argue that China's defeat in this media battle was the result of long-term, unsettled political conditions in that country.
In April 1928, Chiang Kai-shek launched the second Northern Expedition against the warlord-backed Beijing government led by Zhang Zuolin. As Chiang's troops marched towards Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong, to remove the local warlord Han Fuju, the Japanese government dispatched troops to the city ostensibly to protect the 2,000 Japanese nationals living there and their property. On the morning of 3 May, firing broke out in Jinan between Chiang's army and the Japanese troops. Chiang immediately sought a peaceful resolution to the crisis by sending a diplomatic team led by Cai Gongshi to negotiate with the Japanese. However, Cai and his 16 associates were tortured and murdered by Japanese soldiers.Footnote 1 On 7 May, without conferring with his superiors in Tokyo, the Japanese commander General Fukuda Hikosuke presented Chiang with a 12-hour ultimatum which Chiang was unable to accept. The fighting escalated on 8 May. By 11 May, the Japanese had driven Chiang's troops out of the city and governed the area through a puppet organization composed of Chinese citizens. Instead of continuing the fight with Japanese forces, Chiang bypassed Jinan to resume the Expedition northward. Not until March 1929 did Japan, under pressure from Western powers, return Jinan to the Guomindang government.Footnote 2
The Jinan Incident, the most serious military clash between China and Japan in the 1920s, was also the Nanjing government's first experience of handling military confrontation with Japan. However, eclipsed by more serious Sino-Japanese conflict in the 1930s, the Incident has escaped scholarly attention. Historians tend to regard the Manchurian crisis as the turning point in Japan's imperialist policy from economic cooperation to military expansion. Existing studies on the Sino-Japanese War mainly focus on events between 1931 and 1945. Iriye Akira, among the few to study the Jinan Incident, has provided a detailed narrative of the event. He argues that the Incident ended the brief period of Sino-Japanese amity and foreshadowed the more significant collisions between the two nations in 1931 and beyond.Footnote 3 Donald A. Jordan considered the implications of the Incident for the Northern Expedition, arguing that it damaged the reputation of the Japanese-supported northern warlords and accelerated their defeat.Footnote 4 Despite such valuable insights, these studies mainly focus on the conventional military and political aspects of the event. The playing out of the Chinese and Japanese confrontation in the media during the Incident remains to be explored.
While the battle on the front line was fierce, the rivalry between the two nations in the media was equally bitter. Both sides endeavoured to present their cases in the English-language press in the hope of eliciting foreign support. Japan sought to justify its military action in Jinan and dissuade Western powers from intervention, while China hoped to exert moral pressure on Japan's aggression, invite foreign mediation, and boost the international prestige of the newly established Nanjing regime. Since the treaty-port English-language press was an important and credible source for the metropolitan press abroad, both countries actively sought control of this channel to extend their international influence. Many scholars have noticed the importance of the treaty-port English-language papers in China. Studies have focused on their transnational nature,Footnote 5 their connection with the newspapers abroad, and their influence on foreign communities in China.Footnote 6 However, little research has been done to examine the role of these papers in the Sino-Japanese conflict. This paper intends to fill this gap.
In examining the development of news networks by China and Japan before the Jinan Incident, I first analyse how well each side was prepared for the rivalry. I then consider competition between the two countries in the English-language press in the treaty ports, focusing on how they responded to the Incident and how they justified their positions. The opinions of the British- and American-controlled treaty-port papers will be discussed to reveal their engagement in this media battle. This will be followed by a review of public opinion in London and New York in order to demonstrate the extent to which China's voice was drowned out by Japanese propaganda abroad.
English-language newspapers and news agencies controlled by Japan
News never becomes news without being told. It was irrelevant how China and Japan would justify their cases in the press, until their message reached the target audience. Before analysing narratives of the Incident delivered by both countries, it is necessary to ask how well Japanese and Chinese news networks had been developed to transmit their messages. Competition between China and Japan in the construction of news networks in China began in the 1910s. By 1928, Japan's international news agencies were more advanced than those of China.
Japan's news service in China began with the Toho news agency, which was reorganized by an agent of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1920.Footnote 7 The agency became the ministry's official organ in China. It received a regular subsidy from Tokyo and achieved quick successes after breaking into China's news market. To break Reuters’ monopoly, Toho sold its news at aggressive discounts that drastically undercut the prices Reuters charged foreign and Chinese newspapers.Footnote 8 By 1928, Toho had won contracts with most of the newspapers in China, English-language and Chinese-language alike. Its news was even frequently quoted in key metropolitan papers, such as The Times of London and The New York Times.
Japan also controlled several English-language papers in China, the first being the Manchurian Daily News in Dalian. Among these, the North China Standard was an important paper based in Beijing. The paper was founded in 1919 by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs with financial support of $60,000 per year.Footnote 9 Apart from explaining Japanese views and activities in China, the paper also had the goal of competing with a Chinese-operated English-language daily, the Peking Leader, to offset the anti-Japanese influence that the Leader exerted upon foreign and Chinese readers. The Standard tried hard to squeeze the Leader out of the Chinese market. As a contemporary journalist wrote, the two fought ‘like cats and dogs’.Footnote 10 Although the Leader passed from Chinese to American control in 1925, the change of ownership did not shift its editorial direction and the Standard continued to see the Leader as its primary rival. The Standard's anti-Guomindang stance won it immense popularity in the Beijing Legation Quarter and among die-hard foreign businessmen in Shanghai. Its ties with the Fengtian clique, the most powerful warlord faction in North China, also allowed it to be directly involved in China's political struggles.Footnote 11
In addition to establishing English-language papers in North China, Japan also attempted to control newspapers operated by Westerners in Shanghai, such as the Far Eastern Review: Engineering, Finance, Commerce. This monthly journal was originally founded in Manila in 1904 by an American national, George Bronson Rea, and moved to Shanghai in 1912. The journal maintained offices in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo. Its large network enabled it to reach audiences worldwide. Apart from providing engineering and financial information, the journal also carried long editorials on political issues in East Asia. Its wide scope attracted readers in various fields. By the late 1920s, the Far Eastern Review had an estimated monthly circulation of 6,000, making it a highly competitive player in the English-language press market in Shanghai.Footnote 12
Initially Rea was sympathetic to China's desire for autonomy and opposed Japan's growing power in the Pacific. He endorsed the open door policy in China and saw Japan as a potential enemy of the United States.Footnote 13 As the Chinese government lacked its own English-language papers to present its case, the Far Eastern Review—Rea's prime platform for the dissemination of his political ideas—became an effective propaganda tool for advocating China's position. In the 1910s, Rea had been close to senior Guomindang officials, notably Sun Yat-sen and his son Sun Ke. He had also been an adviser to the Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.Footnote 14
However, in 1920 Rea suddenly shifted sides, becoming a supporter of Japanese interests. He changed the policy of the Far Eastern Review and published several books and pamphlets justifying Japanese actions in China.Footnote 15 Rea's reversal of opinion led to the resignation of his co-editor, W. H. Donald, who openly declared his disapproval of Rea's new policy.Footnote 16 Rea's shift was investigated by both the Office of Naval Intelligence of the United States and the American Legation in Beijing. Although he explained that he ‘had become tired of fighting China's battles when their own statesmen were selling their country to Japan’,Footnote 17 the American investigators believed that the problem lay elsewhere, namely that Chinese officials had failed to pay the bill Rea had presented to them for his pro-Chinese publicity in the Far Eastern Review at the time of the Paris Peace Conference.Footnote 18 In a letter to the military attaché, John B. Powell, editor of the China Weekly Review, confirmed that Rea had complained about being ‘unfairly treated’ by Chinese leaders ‘in view of the great amount of service he had done for them’.Footnote 19 With Rea on the verge of breaking ties with the Chinese government, Japan promptly invested in the magazine and transformed it into one of its key propaganda organs in Shanghai.Footnote 20 It was estimated that the Japanese government paid US$100,000 a year to the journal.Footnote 21 Indeed, obtaining Rea's support was a significant coup for Japan: it both strengthened its own foreign propaganda network and weakened that of China.
Another important paper that fell into Japanese hands was the Shanghai Times. This paper was officially registered as a British daily and operated by a British subject, E. A. Nottingham. Yet beneath the veneer of British ownership lay Japanese interests. The police office in the French Concession in Shanghai discovered that the paper not only received a grant from the Yokohama Specie Bank, but also accepted subsidies from the Japanese government, beginning in 1924.Footnote 22 Although the paper never openly acknowledged its links to Japanese interests, its pro-Japanese editorial line raised suspicions among some Western journalists in China. Carl Crow, an American journalist and businessman, believed the paper was controlled by Japan even though it was owned and edited by the British.Footnote 23 John B. Powell also regarded Nottingham's editorship as nominal.Footnote 24
China's English-language news network
Compared with the resources possessed by Japan, China's foreign propaganda network was underdeveloped. By 1928, China still had no efficient national or international news agency of its own. Most of China's domestic and international news was transmitted by foreign news agencies, particularly Reuters, which had begun operating in China in 1872. With special correspondents in practically all of the principal telegraphic centres in China,Footnote 25 Reuters controlled the channel of news distribution and became the narrator of Chinese developments for both the foreign press and Chinese native papers.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, with the proliferation of international news agencies after the First World War, by the 1920s Reuters was facing significant challenges from Japan's Toho agency, the Havas agency of France, the Tass agency of Russia, and the United Press of the United States.Footnote 27 In the fierce competition among foreign news agencies, none of China's own news agencies was strong enough to compete. The privilege of interpreting Chinese issues was held tightly in the hands of these foreign agencies.
The lack of a strong Chinese-owned news agency did not go unrecognized. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese newspapermen had tried to organize news agencies in various forms. Although these efforts began much earlier than Japan's establishment of Toho in China, none of these attempts succeeded because of the unstable political environment.
Efforts came primarily from individual journalists who registered news agencies of their own and sold their services to their warlord patrons. Such private news agencies mushroomed during the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican period. It has been estimated that by 1926, the number of news agencies in China had reached 155.Footnote 28 Despite the large number of agencies, the quality of the services they provided was far from satisfactory. Since most agencies relied on local warlords for funding, their services focused on promoting the interests of their patrons and were seen largely as propaganda organs for various factions.Footnote 29 The warlords’ patronage also prevented these private agencies from expanding their business beyond the borders of their patrons’ domains. The majority of these private agencies, therefore, remained local organizations.
Realizing that news agencies run by individual journalists were prone to factional manipulation, small newspapers sought to form news agencies by grouping themselves together into news cooperatives. In May 1920, two leading newspapers in Guangzhou (Canton)—the 72 Hang Shang Bao and Xin Min Guo Bao—rallied 120 newspapers and news agencies across the country and established a ‘National Press Cooperation Committee’ (Quanguo baojie lianhe hui). Inspired by the model of the Associated Press, the Committee intended to create a news agency by combining the resources of its member newspapers. The Committee also envisaged expanding its national network abroad by sending professional journalists to key European cities and securing contacts with Chinese students abroad.Footnote 30 Grand as this plan was, the Committee's operation was constantly hindered by struggles among the warlords. Unable to survive in the unstable political environment, the Committee soon broke up.
Owners of big newspapers also sought to set up news agencies, making them a sub-organization of their papers. The relatively influential news agencies of this type were the Guo Wen news agency established by Hu Zhengzhi, managing director and editor of Da Gong Bao, and the Shen Shi news agency initiated by two of the most prominent Chinese dailies in Shanghai, Shen Bao and Shi Shi Xin Bao.Footnote 31 Yet by 1928 these agencies only offered services in Chinese for vernacular papers. They had failed to forge direct links with the foreign press.
Aside from such private efforts, the Guomindang government in Guangzhou also made attempts to build news agencies. It established the Central News Agency within its propaganda department in 1924, hoping to develop it into a national agency. Without a long-term plan or a streamlined structure, the Agency remained a loose organization, unable to compete with Guo Wen and Shen Shi, let alone Toho and Reuters.Footnote 32 In 1927, immediately after Chiang Kai-shek established his regime in Nanjing, the government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs set up the Guo Min news agency, with the goal of making the Chinese case to the outside world. It became the only Chinese news agency to offer an English-language service. Based in Shanghai, the agency boasted a strong management team led by Zhang Sixu (Samuel H. Chang) and Li Cai (Lee Choy). Both had received university degrees in the West and possessed extensive experience in operating English-language papers in China. Despite this, the agency did not have sufficient funding to hire its own correspondents. Instead, it collected information by translating and rewriting news from Chinese papers. Its close ties with the government, which ensured that it had priority in gaining exclusives from both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Finance, was the main reason why the agency was quoted by the foreign press.Footnote 33
In parallel with the failure to build a strong news agency were the Chinese governments’ repeated yet unsuccessful attempts to control an influential English-language paper. After the fall of Qing rule, the warlords and members of the elite in Beijing were keen to invest in English-language papers. The Peking Leader was one such example. The paper was founded in 1920 by the Research Clique (Yanjiuxi), a powerful political group headed by Liang Qichao. The group invited Diao Minqian (M. Tukzung Tyau), an expert on Chinese foreign relations, to edit the paper.Footnote 34 Political changes in the government, however, necessitated its reorganization in 1925. The American Grover Clark gained control of the paper, becoming both editor and president.Footnote 35 Yet American patronage did not save the paper from frequent financial difficulties due to its small number of subscriptions in North China and a business downturn caused by endless military disturbances. Meanwhile, the paper's American identity and financial hardship made it ideal prey for local warlords. In 1927, Hallet Abend, co-editor of the paper, discovered that the Leader was receiving regular allowances from Feng Yuxiang, a northern warlord sympathetic to Bolshevism.Footnote 36
Members of the Guomindang also attempted to gain a position in the English-language press. After the 1911 revolution, the Guomindang, under instruction from Sun Yat-sen, founded the China Republican (also known as the China Gazette) in the French Concession of Shanghai. The paper was edited by Ma Su, Sun Yat-sen's English secretary; Dong Xianguang (Hollington K. Tong), a graduate from the Journalism School of the University of Missouri; and R. I. Hope, a Briton of Indian extraction. Chesney Duncan, editor of the Hong Kong Telegraph, also frequently contributed to the paper. The goal of the Republican was to glorify Sun's plans for the nation and to denounce Yuan Shikai's rule.Footnote 37 Its anti-Yuan policy soon caught the attention of China's elites and the authorities.Footnote 38 In 1913 the paper was closed down by the consul general of France in Shanghai, upon the request of the Yuan government. Ma Su, the publisher of the paper and of Chinese and French parentage, was deported from China and the contributor Chesney Duncan was threatened with prosecution.Footnote 39
After the Guomindang established its authority in Guangzhou, it started a semi-official English paper, the Canton Gazette, operated by Li Cai. The paper supported the left wing of the party and gained popularity in the mid-1920s when Guangzhou was the political centre of China. It attracted prominent foreign journalists like Hallett Abend and gained editorial assistance from Chen Youren (Eugene Chen), the foreign minister of the Guangzhou government.Footnote 40 However, after the Guomindang moved its capital to Wuhan in November 1926, its influence quickly waned.
In Wuhan, the Guomindang started a political journal called the People's Tribune. This paper was set up by Chen Youren and Mikhail Borodin, a Comintern agent in China, with the help of American journalists, William and Rayna Prohme, who were sympathetic to Bolshevism. The Tribune, mailed daily to a list (provided by Borodin) of more than 5,000 liberal individuals and radical organizations across the world, aimed to inform a foreign audience about the Wuhan government's ideology and achievements.Footnote 41 Nonetheless, the journal was short-lived as a result of the Guomindang's internal struggles. In July 1927, Wang Jingwei closed down the paper after it carried an article by Song Qingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) criticizing the Guomindang for having betrayed Sun's doctrines.Footnote 42
While Japan had a powerful news network comprising Toho and several English-language newspapers, China's propaganda network was, by comparison, deficient. With neither an effective news agency nor an English-language paper to reach a foreign audience, China's side of the story could only be heard when the foreign-controlled agencies or papers chose to quote its version of events. Such a disadvantage manifested itself fully during the Jinan Incident.
Responses to the Jinan Incident in the English-language press
With the benefit of a powerful news network, the Japanese media's response to the Jinan Incident was swift, consistent, and intensive. The first dispatch about the military conflict was sent shortly after fighting broke out. Before any investigation of responsibility had been made, the Toho news agency had dispatched accounts from Beijing to the world, asserting that the trouble had been caused by looting carried out by Chinese soldiers.Footnote 43 In the hours that followed, dispatches on the Incident continued to be distributed from Toho's branch offices around China. Despite their different sources, all messages consistently stuck to the explanation of ‘looting’, with each bringing new details of the crime. Japanese soldiers were thus portrayed as innocent defenders who were ‘compelled’ to return fire at the disobedient Chinese looters. By the end of the first day, at least seven dispatches had been sent from Toho, all blaming Chinese soldiers for the fighting,Footnote 44 and as the sole source of the conflict, reinforced by consistent statements and repetition. It should be noted that the first few reports on the Incident were likely to have been decisive in forming public opinion, since they gave readers their first basic information on events and were thus likely to influence any future judgements they made.
Toho's reports went unchallenged in the English-language press for days. China's lack of an effective news network was to some degree responsible, but this alone could not explain the complete absence of its side of the story. The situation was exacerbated by the state of communications with forces on the battlefield. In order to isolate the armies of the northern warlords, the Nationalist troops had cut rail lines linking Jinan with Nanjing, Beijing, and Qingdao prior to the battle.Footnote 45 The telegraph lines, which followed the rail lines, were also destroyed. Communication with Jinan, therefore, was solely reliant on two wireless stations in the city, one controlled by the Japanese and the other by the Chinese. Soon after the clash began on 3 May, Japanese soldiers destroyed the Chinese wireless station, leaving the Japanese station as the only channel for communications.Footnote 46 The destruction of the Chinese station not only impeded the transmission of news, but also affected general communications between Jinan and Nanjing. It was reported that the Nationalist government could only reach Chiang by first telegraphing to Yanzhou, about 60 miles south of Jinan, and then sending messages by courier.Footnote 47 The lack of efficient communications on the Nationalist side left Japan in control of all news from Jinan to the outside world.
Had alternative explanations been offered by other foreign media sources, Japan's version of events may not have so easily prevailed. Despite Toho's heavy stake in China's news market, it was still Reuters that occupied the primary position globally. Reuters also enjoyed higher credibility than Toho because of its third-party position. However, Reuters did not present an alternative view. Rivalry between Toho and Reuters in China was primarily a matter of business, not politics. Instead of giving credence to non-Japanese sources or remaining sceptical about the Japanese version of events, Reuters followed the Japanese line, reporting that the trouble had arisen because of looting by Chinese soldiers.Footnote 48 In doing so, Reuters buttressed the Japanese side in three ways: first, repeating Toho's reports helped to reinforce belief in the Japanese version of events; second, Reuters’ worldwide service assisted in distributing the Japanese story more widely; and third, Reuters enhanced Toho's credibility in the world press. Together the two agencies monopolized outgoing reports of the Incident and established the cause of ‘looting’ as a fact in the press.
Compared with Japan's immediate and intensive explanations in the English-language press, China's response was slow and inconsistent. The Nanjing government's report on the Incident did not appear in the English-language papers until 5 May, when the North China Daily News Footnote 49 cited a dispatch from the official Guo Min news agency. According to the Guo Min report, the shooting occurred when Japanese troops arrested several members of the Nationalist propaganda corps and threatened to shoot anyone attempting to pass through a Japanese-controlled barricade.Footnote 50 However, in the two days that had passed since the Incident, Toho and Reuters had thoroughly established the Japanese version of events in the press. China's task now was to convert the audience's entrenched understanding of events rather than introduce its version of what was happening in Jinan. Converting opinion is far more difficult than establishing it in the first place. It may require the media to put forward the counter argument continuously and with greater intensity. Without an efficient news network, the Nanjing government was unable to achieve this. Indeed, China could barely make its voice heard in the English-language press. For example, the China Press,Footnote 51 one of the most popular English-language papers in China, offered intensive coverage of the Jinan Incident for the ten days after its start. Among the 168 reports concerning the Incident that appeared in the paper during this period, only 14 were sourced from Guo Min. In comparison, it carried 107 reports from Reuters and 47 from Toho. These figures suggested that its main sources were Western or Japanese agencies, which together accounted for 91.6 per cent of reports in the China Press concerning the Incident.
China's reports on the Jinan Incident were also inconsistent. Multiple explanations concerning the origin of the fighting were distributed to the English-language press. The various accounts not only confused the foreign audience but also severely damaged China's credibility. Shortly after Guo Min's interpretation found its way into the press, Chiang Kai-shek and Huang Fu, the minister of foreign affairs, issued another account on 5 May, stating that the Incident was caused by Japanese troops shooting Chinese soldiers while the latter were passing through Japanese-controlled streets.Footnote 52 While Guo Min's account declared that the fighting had begun with a clash between Chinese propagandists and Japanese soldiers, Chiang's version dropped the reference to Chinese propagandists and asserted that the conflict was triggered by fighting between the two groups of troops. Another account circulating in the press claimed that Japanese soldiers had prevented Nationalist forces from crossing the railway line in order to protect fleeing northern troops.Footnote 53 Although all versions blamed Japan for the fighting, the disagreement on the basic reason for it gave the impression that the Chinese were fabricating their accounts, unsure of how to effectively justify their aggression. Indeed, the existence of multiple accounts was a result of the Nanjing government's lack of institutions for disseminating systematic propaganda in the treaty-port press. There appears to have been no coordination between the official agency Guo Min and the Guomindang's top leaders regarding explanations for the cause of the Incident.
The Nanjing government's indecision over how best to deal with the foreign propaganda was also significant. After the fighting broke out, the immediate solution pursued by the government was to localize the problem and solve it rapidly. Initially Chiang Kai-shek was not keen to publicize the affair internationally, fearing that extended exposure of the Incident in the media would complicate the issue and undermine attempts to reach agreement with Japan. After all, in Shandong at the time the completion of the Northern Expedition was deemed to be more important than confrontation with Japan.Footnote 54 It was hoped that a quick solution could be found, perhaps by negotiating with Japanese forces locally. Accordingly, Chiang's reaction was twofold: while seeking a cease-fire with Japanese military officers on the front line, he also appealed to foreign consulates in China, especially those of Britain and the United States, for mediation.Footnote 55 However, both approaches failed to produce favourable results. The Nanjing government found it difficult to satisfy the Japanese generals who threatened to bomb Jinan to force further concessions from China. The foreign consulates also refused to mediate unless a request to do so was received from both Japan and China.Footnote 56 This reply was tantamount to a denial of help, since Japan did not favour mediation by a third party.
The Nanjing government changed its foreign propaganda strategy from 8 May when Japanese forces launched a new round of attacks on Nationalist soldiers and began bombing Jinan. Believing that the ineffectiveness of China's voice was due not to the lack of a case but rather to the lack of a channel to make its case known, the Nanjing leaders began to seek a new way to distribute China's views.Footnote 57 Instead of publicizing news inside China and passively waiting for the foreign media to transmit it externally, Nanjing sought to present its case directly to foreign audiences. The first step taken by Nanjing was to report the Jinan Incident to the League of Nations, calling upon it to intervene and arrange an international inquiry into the Incident.Footnote 58 On 11 May, Tan Yankai, chairman of the Nationalist Government Council, issued an official appeal to the secretary-general of the League of Nations. In the appeal, Tan gave a thorough account of the Chinese interpretation of the Jinan Incident. He criticized Japan's dispatch of troops to Shandong, the attacks and atrocities committed since 3 May, and the bombing of Jinan on 8 May. Tan demanded that the League intervene to end Japanese hostilities, press Japan to withdraw troops from Shandong, and arrange an international inquiry into the Incident.Footnote 59 By so doing, Nanjing officials indicated to the world that they had faith in their version of events and hoped an impartial inquiry from the League would endorse their position. On 13 May, the League rejected China's appeal on the grounds that it still recognized the Beijing government, not that of Nanjing, as the official government of China. Guomindang leaders were fully aware of their lack of legitimacy in the eyes of the League prior to their appeal. Nevertheless, they still saw their appeal as an opportunity to publicize their case before the court of international opinion, since any move by the League of Nations would be monitored by the world's press.Footnote 60 Hu Hanmin, one of the Guomindang's top leaders, indicated the purpose of reporting the Jinan case to the League of Nations in correspondence with Huang Fu:
[T]he Nanjing Government has not gained recognition from the League of Nations, yet issuing the appeal with the support of the Beijing government will boost the prestige of the northern warlords. The league was controlled by the big powers, with a Briton being the president and Japan strongly influencing its political decisions. China has no chance to win. Even if the league intervened, it would only conduct investigations of the incident, offering no immediate solutions. That is why the United States refrains from stepping in. Nevertheless, we should appeal to the league for propaganda purposes. . . The chance of winning is always slim when it comes to the rivalry with the powers. But publicizing our causes is better than remaining silent.Footnote 61
The Nanjing government also appealed directly to American President Calvin Coolidge, inquiring about ‘the attitude of the American government and the people towards this grave situation created by Japan’.Footnote 62 In this appeal, the Nanjing government again lengthily reviewed events as it saw them, aiming to reinforce the Chinese version of the Incident. As expected by Nanjing officials, the appeal received no response from the United States. However, China's case was widely publicized in the process, which partly served Nanjing's purpose.
To further reinforce China's position concerning the Jinan Incident in the eyes of world, the Nanjing government sent high officials as ‘special envoys’ to key capitals. Among them, Wu Chaoshu (C. C. Wu) was sent to Washington, Wang Chonghui to London, Wang Jingwei to Geneva, Hu Hanmin and Li Shizeng to Paris, and Sun Ke to the Hague and Berlin. Their job was to offer liaison between key foreign newspapers and Chinese sources, to give public talks on the Jinan Incident, and to elicit support from government officials in the target countries.Footnote 63 Prior to his trip, Wu intimated to American journalists that the object of his mission to Washington was ‘to make the Nationalist case clear to the United States’ and ‘make sure America will not be led astray by propaganda’.Footnote 64 These emissaries hoped to draw Western countries into mediation, but Chinese officials knew that these countries would not intercede until they had a clearer understanding of the situation. With the Japanese interpretation dominant, making the Chinese version acceptable to foreign audiences was a prerequisite for securing foreign support.
The influence of the context of treaty-port opinion
Japan: The Jinan Incident—a second Nanjing Incident, 1927
In addition to its advantages in the dissemination of news, Japan also enjoyed the favourable opinion of other foreigners in the treaty ports. Indeed, Japan shared with Western powers their ‘foreign’ identity and experience of colonization in China. China's anti-foreign sentiment was a common problem for both Japan and Western nations. Resentment against China could easily be stirred if Japan was able to convince Western readers that the Jinan Incident was simply a further example of an outrage committed by the Chinese against foreigners.
To invoke anti-Chinese feelings among Westerners, Japanese newspapermen attempted to portray the Jinan Incident as a second Nanjing Incident in the English-language press. The Nanjing Incident took place during the first Northern Expedition. On 24 May 1927, Guomindang troops defeated northern warlords in Nanjing and occupied the city. They then embarked on looting and killing foreigners throughout the city. American and British warships on nearby rivers responded by shelling Chinese forces, causing heavy Chinese casualties and damaging property. Chiang Kai-shek later blamed the acts on communist elements within the army, an explanation that Westerners were ready to accept. Negotiations on the settlement of the Nanjing Incident dragged on for over a year. The Nanjing government only reached an agreement with the United States regarding an apology and a remedy in April 1928, less than a month before the Jinan Incident began.Footnote 65 Settlement with Britain, however, was still pending due to a deadlock over issues related to the revision of treaties.Footnote 66
The Nanjing Incident offered a favourable precedent for Japan to justify its own actions in Jinan. The two incidents shared many common features: both occurred during the nationalistic Northern Expeditions and both involved clashes between Guomindang troops and foreigners. Furthermore, the Nanjing Incident had taken place just the year before and was the most recent example of Sino-foreign conflict. The foreign community's memory of the Guomindang's lawless actions was still fresh and resentment against Nationalist troops had not been allayed due to the incomplete settlement of the case.
Japanese newspapermen reported details of the Jinan case after the Nanjing model. As mentioned above, Toho intensively repeated its descriptions of the scenes of looting in its discourse on the Incident, thereby justifying Japan's military action. It should be noted that Japanese reports of the looting during the Jinan Incident may not have been accurate. Reports from neutral sources, such as the Manchester Guardian Footnote 67 and The New York Times, failed to confirm the looting, and contemporary scholars have also been unable to verify whether the looting took place and, if it did, its intensity.Footnote 68 Japanese propagandists may have fabricated the looting in order to portray events in Jinan as a second Nanjing Incident in the media. Even if the looting did occur, repeatedly reporting it made for effective propaganda, since it resonated with foreigners’ experiences in Nanjing and reaffirmed their impression of China's ‘barbarism’.
The Japanese-controlled news institutions also repeated arguments from the Nanjing case. While looting in the Nanjing Incident was believed to have been started by rebelling communists within the Guomindang army, the communist element and the internal chaos were introduced in Japan's reporting on the Jinan affair, despite the fact that Chiang had excluded the communists from the Northern Expedition Army in 1927.Footnote 69 Immediately after the conflict on 3 May, Toho claimed that the looting had been planned by Feng Yuxiang, a ‘communist general hidden in the nationalist armies’. According to Toho, disturbances were created in order to overthrow Chiang's authority.Footnote 70
Nonetheless, Japan's strategy of linking the two incidents had its drawbacks. It invited readers to question Japan's expedition to Shandong in the first place. While the Nanjing Incident was initially a clash between Chinese soldiers and Western civilians, the Jinan Incident was, in fact, a battle between Chinese and Japanese troops. The existence of Japanese troops in Jinan had brought about the possibility of a military clash. Without a good reason for reinforcing troops in Jinan, Japan's claim to be a victim remained weak since the Incident could easily be perceived as trouble Japan brought on itself.
Justifying the Japanese expedition to Shandong was more difficult than explaining Japan's attack in Jinan. It could be argued that the expedition was a result of the inability of the civil government—led by Tanaka Giichi—to rein in military ambitions. China and Japan had opportunities to avoid confrontation in Jinan and both governments made attempts to do so. From the autumn of 1927, Chiang Kai-shek had made several attempts to persuade Japan not to intervene in Shandong. He had repeatedly guaranteed that he would not tolerate anti-foreign activities by his troops and had given assurances that he would work to protect the lives and property of foreigners in China.Footnote 71 To seek further amity with Japan, Chiang replaced the Western-educated Minister of Foreign Affairs Wu Chaoshu with the Japanese-educated Huang Fu in February 1928, even though some top leaders in Nanjing strongly opposed Huang's appointment.Footnote 72 Meanwhile, the Tanaka cabinet also hesitated before dispatching more troops to Jinan. Neither the prime minister nor the general staff were fully convinced that the expedition was necessary for the protection of Japanese nationals.Footnote 73 However, the military had its own views on the subject. Pressure from the War Ministry finally forced Tanaka to sanction the expedition in mid-April 1928.
Japan's propaganda also faced challenges from its domestic audience. On 5 May, Tokyo newspapers, with the exception of Nichi Nichi, blamed the Japanese government's hostile policy for the conflict in Jinan.Footnote 74 They believed that Japan's dispatch of forces to Shandong, instead of protecting Japanese property, had severely harmed trade with China. Japanese commercial interests in Shandong, which ‘amounted to no less than $440,000,000 for the current fiscal year’, ‘were too large to incur the ill-will of the Chinese, who were their best customers’.Footnote 75 Furthermore, some argued that the troops which were intended to protect the inhabitants only provided other forces with a pretext to attack. They maintained that the trouble could have been avoided had no Japanese troops been present.Footnote 76 If the intention to protect the Japanese nationals was genuine, challenged the domestic papers, the government could have temporarily relocated Japanese civilians to the nearby city of Qingdao instead of leaving them in Jinan to face possible military conflict.Footnote 77 The Japanese propaganda machine was thus caught in a dilemma: the more Japanese nationals suffered in the Jinan Incident, the more Japan could blame China for its ‘barbarism’ and thus justify its use of force, but at the same time, casualties among Japanese nationals would enrage the domestic public. The War Office was believed to have tried to withhold reports on Japanese casualties for fear that ‘publication of exceptionally heavy Japanese civilian losses would have a detrimental effect politically throughout the country’.Footnote 78
The opposing views in Japan's domestic papers reflected a general disagreement on the government's shift in foreign policy. While the previous Minister of Foreign Affairs Shidehara Kijuro had pursued a non-interventionist policy towards China, seeking good relations through trade and economic cooperation, the newly inaugurated cabinet led by Tanaka Giichi tended to deal with the rising Chinese nationalist government by force. The sharp change of strategy was not welcomed by those in financial circles, especially in the Kansai region. Distrusting the capacity of northern warlords to maintain control, they also feared that Japan's military actions would alienate the Nationalist Party and thus affect their trade with China after the Party seized power.Footnote 79 They believed that Japan's limited interests in Jinan were not worth running the risk of unfavourable trade relations with China in the future. However, they were unaware that the government had its own plans. Their goal in intervening in Jinan was to protect Japan's larger interests in Manchuria. For years, Japan had been strengthening its control over the region by supporting the local warlord Zhang Zuolin. By facing the approaching Nationalist army, Tanaka sought to prevent Chiang from reaching Manchuria. Reinforcing Japanese troops in Jinan was in part a strategy to demonstrate the government's determination to protect its treaty rights and to prevent the spread of revolutionary ideas and practices in North China.Footnote 80
Meanwhile, Zhang Zuolin also sought to reap political benefits from the Jinan Incident. His participation in the propaganda battle further complicated Japan's position. Although Japan insisted that its action in Jinan was taken solely to protect its nationals, Zhang tried to embroil Japan in China's internal struggles through the media. Soon after the Incident began, Zhang distributed a message to the press, offering to assist Japan with arms and ammunition.Footnote 81 His offer immediately raised people's suspicions about Japan's connections with the Beijing government. Rumours began to circulate in the press that Japan was using the Jinan Incident to assist the northern army. However, Zhang's statement was not a genuine offer to help Japan. Throughout the Jinan Incident, Zhang exhibited an ambiguous stance, making him an unreliable ally for both Japan and the Nanjing government. Two days after his announcement, Zhang did an about turn and issued a protest to the Japanese diplomats in Beijing, demanding that Japanese troops withdraw from Chinese territory.Footnote 82 On 9 May, he circulated another message announcing a temporary cessation of the civil war due to the Sino-Japanese conflict.Footnote 83
China's dilemma
In 1928 China was unfavourably positioned in the court of public opinion. Two features characterized its image in the Western press, the first being underdevelopment and disorder, the second being anti-foreignism. China's anti-imperialist passions had peaked in the 1920s. In 1924, Sun Yat-sen wrote nationalism into the Three People's Principles, which became the guidelines for the Nationalist Party. The aim of this nationalism was to overthrow imperialism and achieve racial and national equality with the other nations of the world.Footnote 84 In 1925, the May Thirtieth Movement elevated anti-foreign sentiment, particularly against the British, to new heights.Footnote 85 The 1926 Northern Expedition constituted further aggravation. With Bolshevik support, the National Revolutionary Army had reclaimed the British settlements of Hankou and Jiujiang and had also threatened foreign lives and property after taking Nanjing. These events convinced Western audiences that Nationalist armies were likely to be responsible for another anti-foreign incident in Jinan.
Nevertheless, leaders in Nanjing clearly understood that China, as a weak country, could not afford to confront all the foreign powers at the same time. With regard to events in Jinan, the Nanjing government singled out Japan as its sole enemy and was anxious to seek amity with Western powers, in particular looking to Britain and the United States to check Japan's aggression through mediation. Chiang was concerned to have Britain on side in the event that diplomatic efforts failed and China was forced to confront Japan militarily.Footnote 86 Furthermore, following the Northern Expedition, Chiang Kai-shek was keen to establish his government's prestige and gain international recognition for his regime. These aims required a shift in diplomatic paradigm from anti-imperialism generally, particularly against Britain, to a focus on Japan.
This shift was not an easy one to make. With anti-foreign sentiment running high among the Chinese public, any party in China hoping to gain popular support understood the need to address public anger towards imperialism and mobilize it for their own use. Both the Nationalist Party and the communists understood this. Even the warlords who secretly looked for support from imperialist powers consistently adopted anti-foreign positions to gain public support. Although Chiang severed relations with the Soviets after eliminating the communist element in the Nationalist army and adopted a moderate attitude towards foreign countries, he could not afford to abandon anti-imperialist rhetoric completely. Campaigns against extraterritoriality continued and negotiations over the control of tariff rates dominated China's diplomacy.
Not all Guomindang leaders supported Chiang's overtures to the West. For example, Li Shizeng, one of the top leaders of the Party, tried to dissuade Chiang from reporting the Jinan Incident to the League of Nations, regarding such an effort as futile.Footnote 87 Other left-wing members of the Nationalist Party, in their continuous opposition to Chiang, condemned his resort to the League as ‘begging for mercy’ (qi lian) and betraying the Party's anti-imperialist tradition. An editorial in the Ge Ming Ping Lun, an official paper of Guomindang leftists, exemplifies this attitude:
How stupid and humiliating it is to beg other imperialist powers to help China out of Japan's threat! . . . There is no fundamental difference between Japan and other imperialist countries. The only difference is that Japan acted more directly while other powers coerced China in a concealed manner. Whichever way they pursue, their goal is the same, that is, to obtain special rights in China.Footnote 88
The opinion of the English-language press in the treaty-ports
While China and Japan were trying hard to influence opinion in the treaty-ports, the Westerners in these cities were not a passive audience. They had their own interests to serve. Many Britons in the treaty ports feared China's acts might lead the foreign powers to relinquish their special rights in China, one after another. In the case of Jinan, Japan's defence of its interests in Shandong strengthened imperialist ends in China more generally. China's underdevelopment and lawlessness, as emphasized by Japan, not only justified Japan's military action, but also offered all imperialists a reason to maintain their involvement in China—to teach China how to behave.Footnote 89 Despite the end of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1923 as the result of the Washington Conference, in the 1920s, when competition between the two countries was not as great as it would later become, they still saw each other as allies rather than as enemies. When their interests were threatened by Chinese nationalism or the growing influence of the United States, many people on both sides quietly hoped for the return of the alliance.Footnote 90 Yet for American progressives, who saw an independent and open China as the best market for American exports as well as a means to check Japan's rise in the Pacific,Footnote 91 events in Jinan provided them with a chance to attack foreign intervention in China's affairs. These divergent goals translated into views split between the British and American press in the treaty ports: the British press strongly upheld the Japanese argument, whereas American papers displayed sympathy for China's cause.
The support of British papers for Japan was explicit.Footnote 92 They accepted both Japan's version of the facts and its rationale. In early May, the two largest English-language papers in China—the North China Daily News and the China Press—both endorsed the Japanese version of events. A cursory glance at the headlines of their reports indicates that the papers firmly followed the Japanese line: ‘Chiang Kai-shek Reported to be Powerless to Control Undisciplined Soldiers Who Have Got Out of Hand in City’,Footnote 93 ‘Outburst of Looting by Southern Troops’,Footnote 94 ‘Japan Losing Patience under Calumnies of Nanjing’.Footnote 95 It was accepted professional practice for a journal to report a controversial issue using phrases such as ‘alleged by’. Yet this caution was absent when the papers quoted Japanese sources. In contrast, Chinese sources were usually labelled as ‘unfounded’. As noted earlier, between 4 May and 15 May, when the Incident was at its height, only 8.3 per cent of reports in the China Press derived from Chinese sources. Although China's inability to offer English-language updates on the event was partly responsible for this, the omission of a Chinese voice was more the result of deliberate choice. The editor of the North China Daily News stated that ‘we are inundated with correspondence, manifestoes, student resolutions, copies of telegrams sent abroad, all putting the Chinese view of the Tsinanfu affair. . . [But] we regret to say that we cannot open our columns to propaganda of this kind’.Footnote 96
The Japanese strategy of linking the Jinan Incident with earlier events in Nanjing was also welcomed by British editors. The North China Daily News endorsed the view that the two incidents were connected, believing that events in Jinan were the Guomindang's ‘attempt to reproduce the Nanking outrage as the result of the recent diplomatic indulgence in negotiations for a settlement of that affair’.Footnote 97 With the Nanjing Incident unresolved and anti-British sentiment running high for the previous five years, the British were sympathetic to the Japanese explanation. They trusted Japanese sources not because they found them more persuasive, but because the looting and other atrocities described by Japan vividly reminded them of their own unhappy experiences with China and they believed that such things were very likely to happen again. ‘It would be idle to deny,’ confessed the editor of the North China Daily News, ‘that some of the Southern troops have a bad reputation for looting and arrogance. At a crisis like the present, this cannot be ignored.’Footnote 98 The China Press also supported this view, saying that:
Undisciplined [Nationalist] soldiers on nearly every occasion seem to get beyond the control of their commanders. At Hankow, at Nanking, in Nantao and Chapei, to mention only the instances of the past year, scenes of carnage, chaos and indiscriminate brigandage have characterized every change of government. Innocent citizens have been shot down, valuable property burned, and in other ways the terrible toll of warfare has been made needlessly more horrible. Now Tsinan is suffering from the same degrading lawlessness.Footnote 99
The British papers also upheld Japan's justification for its expedition to Shandong. They intimated that ‘after the experiences of the British in China, it is difficult to be very censorious over the decision of the Japanese government to defend the lives and property of their nationals by the dispatch of troops’.Footnote 100 They believed that Japan ‘in her vast interests in Shandong, has every reason for acting in defence of her own’.Footnote 101 Japan ‘was not only justified in sending troops to protect her people and property in Shandong, but would have gravely neglected her duty if she had not’.Footnote 102
Although the Jinan Incident was basically a Sino-Japanese affair, the British community also used it as an opportunity to vent its anti-Chinese views. Criticism went well beyond the Incident itself, expanding to a condemnation of the Chinese nation. The British press believed that the Jinan Incident only reaffirmed China's underdeveloped status and its uncivilized nature. ‘Now and again,’ stated the China Press, ‘the foreign residents of China are jerked back a few centuries to be reminded that, however modern living conditions in Shanghai may have been made, they are still living on the fringe of a civilization which is back in the Middle Ages.’Footnote 103 Thus, the trouble in Jinan, instead of being caused by Japan, was invited by China itself. The editor of the North China Daily News sarcastically commented that:
The Chinese have only themselves to thank that many of their nationals are dead and the prospects of the northern campaign gravely imperilled. And the question arises, will the Chinese never learn sense? What good did they do themselves by the raid on Hankow? The Concession was left to them. But the moral ascendancy, the honour due to those who could have hit back and did not, passed to Great Britain. What good did the Nanjing outrages do? What could it have profited even if the Southern army in Tsinan had wiped out every Japanese in the place? By every one of these Incidents the Chinese leaders put themselves a stage lower in the eyes of the civilized world and remove their country yet further from that position of acknowledged equality in the family of nations which they so ardently desire.Footnote 104
The anti-Chinese stance, common among the British and Japanese papers, was not without its disagreements however. When Japan bombed Jinan on 8 May and decided to dispatch more troops to Shandong, the British papers shifted their pro-Japanese stance slightly, suggesting then that Japan's actions were unwarranted. Even though the British community was ready to accept Japan's version of events and blame China for starting the clash, it still viewed any escalation unfavourably, fearing that the Sino-Japanese fighting could extend to a new round of anti-foreign activities in China. In an editorial of 11 May, the editor of the North China Daily News called for a joint investigation into the Incident in order to make possible an immediate settlement. The paper also approved of Nanjing's reaction to the Incident for the first time, commending it for localizing the dispute and successfully preventing popular outbursts in the region.Footnote 105 Editorial columns, in which pro-Chinese comments had previously been rejected as propaganda,Footnote 106 now began to report Chinese voices and to quote protests against the British bias towards Japan.Footnote 107 Meanwhile, the paper became cautious about further Japanese moves. It advised Japan to minimize its military operations,Footnote 108 and cited rumours from the treaty ports that Japan's action in Jinan was aimed at intervening in China's civil war in the hope of gaining a favourable position to secure its Manchurian interests.Footnote 109
The China Weekly Review and the Peking Leader, two of the most popular American-owned papers, had taken a decisively anti-Japanese attitude from the outset, disagreeing with the account of the Incident provided by the Japanese authorities. Rather than relying on Japanese reports, the China Weekly Review relayed the information provided by H. J. Timperley, Beijing correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, regarding his version of events as ‘the first impartial accounts by a neutral witness’.Footnote 110 Timperley's reports on the Incident differed from Japanese versions. Before the Incident, he characterized the initial Southern troops’ occupation of Jinan as ‘peaceful’ and ‘exemplary’. He also confirmed that Chiang's soldiers were ‘friendly disposed toward foreigners’.Footnote 111 Regarding the origins of the clash on 3 May, Timperley claimed that the fighting began when Japanese soldiers fired on Nationalist troops passing by in the street. Instead of regarding the fighting as the result of looting, he saw the confrontation as a continuation of a series of Sino-Japanese clashes, including the shooting of a Nationalist officer on the previous day and the detention of Nationalist street lecturers by the Japanese.Footnote 112
Apart from quoting non-Japanese sources, the China Weekly Review also condemned the British papers’ support for Japan, believing that they had assisted in the dissemination of Japanese propaganda. In a front-page editorial on 12 May, the Review singled out the three British dailies—the North China Daily News, the China Press, and the Shanghai Times—for having lined up with Japan ‘without awaiting reports from American and British or other neutral sources in Tsinan’.Footnote 113 The readiness displayed by the three British newspapers in Shanghai to blame China for the trouble, stated the Review, ‘indicated that “die-hard” stock in Shanghai is again on the up-turn’.Footnote 114 In the next issue on 19 May, the journal continued to criticise the British papers, arguing that the Jinan Incident was ‘unfairly reported in the China Press’.Footnote 115 The Peking Leader, while not accusing the British papers of sympathy for Japan, warned those papers to treat Japanese sources with caution. Whatever the causes, commented the Leader, the case itself had inevitably stirred furious feelings between China and Japan. Their passion may have resulted in grossly exaggerated reports of what happened on the ground. In such circumstances, warned the Leader, it was ‘peculiarly necessary to exercise caution both in accepting as valid reports which may be circulated and in voicing condemnation of one side or the other’.Footnote 116
Besides challenging Japanese sources, the Review also disagreed with Japan's claim to be fighting in Jinan for ‘self-protection’. The paper perceived the presence of Japanese troops as the factor that brought about the clash. ‘The presence of a comparatively large armed Japanese force on Chinese soil, cheek by jowl with something like a hundred thousand Nationalists flushed with victory,’ argued the Review, ‘created an atmosphere which rendered some kind of an explosion inevitable’.Footnote 117 This view was endorsed by Hallet Abend in his article in the Leader, in which he claimed that whatever had started the clash, it had only triggered the explosion of tension rather than creating it.Footnote 118 Grover Clark, editor of the Leader, believed that the Japanese commander, knowing of the tensions inside Jinan, could have averted serious disturbance. ‘There certainly would have been no clash,’ argued Clark, ‘if he [General Fukuda Hikosuke] had moved his troops and the civilians only a few miles down the railway towards Tsingdao and kept them there until the main body of the southern army had moved on northward.’Footnote 119
The Review also saw the Nanjing Incident in 1927 as insufficient justification for the Japanese reaction in Jinan. During the Nanjing Incident, argued the journal, both the American and British governments had advised their nationals to evacuate prior to the event.Footnote 120 In contrast, Japan had made no effort to evacuate its nationals before dispatching troops to Jinan. Thus Japan took the action ‘deliberately’ for the purpose of ‘creating trouble’.Footnote 121
Disagreement over the facts and justifications put forward by Japanese sources aroused suspicion of Japan's motives in these American papers. Several explanations were popular. The American editors saw the Incident as an effort by Japan to block the advance of Nationalist troops and assist the warlords in Beijing. They also explained to readers that the Incident was created to ‘shift the Japanese people's attention to the foreign complication’ so as to turn attention away from Japan's troubled domestic politics.Footnote 122 Furthermore, the editors argued that by clashing with the Nationalist government, Japan hoped to extract some concession from the Nationalists and win a favourable position in negotiations over its special interests in Shandong and Manchuria and over the tariff problem.Footnote 123
While China lacked its own English-language network to present its case, the American treaty-port papers provided a channel for a pro-Chinese voice to the outside world. But the effect was limited. The American treaty-port journals were less popular than the British-operated dailies. Compared to the North China Daily News, which sold about 8,000 copies daily,Footnote 124 the China Weekly Review had a circulation of only 4,000–5,000 per week.Footnote 125 In addition, China's weak news network was unable to supply an adequate number of credible reports at critical times. As a result, the Review failed to compete effectively with the Japanese and British papers in the treaty ports and make its voice heard in the metropolitan papers.
Opinion of The Times, Manchester Guardian, and The New York Times
The views presented in the British treaty-port press were largely echoed by the largest newspaper in London, The Times, although the paper was less decided in venting anti-Chinese sentiment. As a paper representing British business interests, it supported Japan's justification of its actions in Jinan. It reported the Incident as resulting from looting by Chinese soldiers.Footnote 126 The editorial on 5 May gave a detailed account of the start of the clash: ‘Looting of Japanese property by individuals followed, and when the Japanese battalion stationed in the quarter interfered, 2,000 Nationalist soldiers quartered close at hand came to the rescue of the criminals and opened fire on the Japanese troops.’Footnote 127 The editorial continued to commend the Japanese government for treating the Incident ‘with sobriety and sound judgement’, and blamed the escalation of fighting on the Guomindang whose passion had gone ‘beyond bounds’.Footnote 128 The newspaper's correspondent also saw the conflict as a repeat of the Nanjing Incident by the undisciplined Nationalist soldiers and rejected the explanation offered by Nanjing:
Some of the Nationalist troops at Tsinanfu were formerly in Chang Chien's division, which committed the outrages at Nanjing, and are now commanded by a general who was ejected from Canton under the Communist outbreak of last December. . . The Nanking Foreign Minister's version of the origin of the outbreak and his statement of the Japanese troops are not regarded by foreigners here as credible. Barbarous conduct is incompatible with the strict discipline of the Japanese Army. . . It is a matter of universal comment here that the career of the Nationalist Army has been marked by outrageous conduct in many places, and that is easy to believe that it has been guilty of further atrocities. In fact, the Nationalist Government, instead of making frank amends for the Nanking outrages, has endeavoured to evade responsibility by making unfounded counter-charges against foreigners and to instil the bitterest anti-foreign feeling into the Army. It will need a great deal of evidence to the contrary to shake the conviction that the Tsinanfu outbreak is the work of the powerful extremist element which pervades the whole Nationalist movement, and is as active today as it was when Borodin was present in person to lead it.Footnote 129
However, most of the paper's discussion of the Incident focused on the event itself, rarely venturing to criticise China's underdevelopment and lawlessness as had the press in the treaty ports. The paper did not seek to interpret the Incident as an outburst of anti-foreign anger by ordinary Chinese soldiers at the front, but believed that it was staged by extremist leaders in the Guomindang government who intended to use the Jinan outrage, together with the Nanjing Incident, to exert pressure on foreign powers to make concessions in the revision of the treaties.Footnote 130
The stance taken by Times, however, was not fully shared by the Manchester Guardian, a platform for liberal and left-wing opinion. The Guardian's take on the Incident was ambiguous. Drawing on the British experience in dealing with the National Revolutionary Army, the paper sympathized with Japan's pre-emptive action to protect its nationals and their property:
The situation is almost exactly that which had been feared might arise when British troops were sent to defend Shanghai, and probably would have arisen had they been sent to defend the towns along the Yangtze valley, where British lives and property were in danger from uncontrolled soldiery. . . Persons can be withdrawn if transport is arranged in time, but property cannot, and after our own experience it is difficult to be very censorious over the decision of the Japanese Government to defend both lives and property by the dispatch of troops.Footnote 131
However, while acknowledging that Japan was following the British model and demonstrating to the Guomindang government that foreign powers had not forgotten previous outrages and insults, the paper was not satisfied with Japan's supervision of its troops in Jinan.Footnote 132 It complained that Japan did not follow the British model completely, and had failed to limit the extent of its reaction as Britain had done in the Nanjing case. While the British government had the wisdom and moderation to resist appeals to exact revenge for the Nanjing outrage, the Japanese did not.Footnote 133 The Japanese army unwarrantedly bombed Jinan in 8 May and reinforced its troops in Shandong.Footnote 134 All these continued to fuel the tension.
The Guardian expressed similar ambiguous attitudes towards China's case. The paper quoted Reuters’ reports to give Japan's side of the story and relied on Timperley, its correspondent in Beijing, to cover the Chinese side. Timperley, as mentioned above, blamed Japan for starting the fighting. He also quoted Huang Fu's protest against Japan's killing of the entire staff of China's Foreign Bureau in Jinan and mutilation of the Chinese Foreign Commissioner Cai Gongshi, material often neglected by other papers who viewed it as Chinese propaganda.Footnote 135 He reaffirmed that Chiang's troops had ‘showed keen desire to avoid any appearance of anti-foreignism’Footnote 136 and testified that Britons and Americans in Jinan were not disturbed by the southern troops.Footnote 137 However, the paper also blamed the low fighting capacities of the National Revolutionary Army:
The great numbers of the Nationalist armies could not make up for their hopeless inferiority in military training and equipment. The Japanese could doubtless seize and hold the whole province of Shantung, if they have a mind to, without extraordinary exertion.Footnote 138
Although looting was not regarded as the cause of the fighting, the paper still believed that it had exacerbated the conflict and reaffirmed Chiang's lack of control.Footnote 139 Such suspicions of Chiang's authority as well as the capabilities of his army were a heavy blow to the prestige of the Nanjing regime, whose authority at the time rested primarily on military power.
Indeed, the paper refrained from making a judgement on the case but saw the fighting as a ‘natural and almost inevitable consequence’ of long-term Sino-Japanese tensions.Footnote 140 The paper was more worried about the outcome of the Incident than interested in determining the cause of it, fearing that the Incident would spark a new round of the anti-foreign movement in China:
With the Japanese firmly entrenched in Shantung one may expect a renewal of the demand that Great Britain should assert herself more firmly in the Yangtze Valley. There may be a recrudescence of the policy of parcelling China into spheres of influence which before the war threatened not only the integrity of China but the good relations of the grabbing Powers. Anti-foreign sentiment, which is almost as strong in the Northern armies as in the Southern, will be inflamed everywhere, and we may look for a renewal of boycotts and other manifestations of hostility.Footnote 141
In contrast, although the American treaty-port papers challenged the Japanese interpretation, their views do not appear to have found their way into newspapers back in the United States. The prominent American newspaper The New York Times maintained a largely neutral stance on the Jinan Incident, with slight indications of sympathy for the Japanese cause. Unlike most of the foreign press, which gained its information on the Jinan event from Reuters and Toho, The New York Times derived its facts from the Associated Press news agency and from its own Chinese correspondents, namely Henry F. Misselwitz and Hallet Abend. All these sources took a cautiously balanced view, giving space to accounts from both sides. Yet the paper still reported news from Japanese sources when they were the only news providers of the event. After fighting broke out on 3 May, for example, the Japanese side of the story dominated coverage of the fighting. Japanese casualties were reported frequently,Footnote 142 while details of Chinese losses were seldom mentioned. Chinese soldiers were portrayed as ruthless killers who slaughtered Japanese civiliansFootnote 143 and burned and buried Japanese soldiers alive,Footnote 144 whereas similar charges against Japan, which were popular in China's domestic papers, were absent from the foreign press.
The New York Times was critical of both Japan and China. Editors of the paper were not convinced by the Japanese explanation that the fighting was started by prearranged looting. They saw Japanese reports on the looting and the subsequent Chinese atrocities simply as an effort to ‘make a second Nanking Incident out of the affair’.Footnote 145 Neither did they agree that Japan had staged the fight to block the advance of Nationalist troops, since ‘Japan has quite enough problems on her hands at the moment to avoid new ones and no war could be as useful to her for some years as a period of peace.’Footnote 146 The paper saw the Incident more as ‘spontaneous quarrels’ arising in times of acute tension, and urged a settlement of the conflict as soon as possible.Footnote 147 The anger towards Japan found in the American treaty-port papers, however, was absent.
Aftermath
The Jinan Incident shaped the Guomindang government's foreign propaganda policies in future Sino-Japanese conflicts. During the Mukden Incident in September 1931, instead of trying to negotiate with Japanese generals at the front, the government immediately sought to publicize Japan's invasion by seeking mediation from the League of Nations. In addition, the need for powerful propaganda machinery was keenly felt among the officials in Nanjing after the Jinan Incident. Cai Yuanpei and Tan Yankai, for example, concluded that China's inadequate propaganda during the Jinan Incident was caused by its lack of news facilities and networks and proposed that the Nanjing government establish a centralized foreign propaganda institution and found English-language newspapers and news agencies.Footnote 148 Drawing on the experience in Jinan, foreign diplomats also repeatedly urged Nanjing to strengthen its foreign propaganda apparatus so as to improve the image of the Chinese nation and boost the prestige of the Nanjing government.Footnote 149 After Chiang Kai-shek overthrew the Beijing government and militarily unified China, the Nanjing government installed an international division within the party's Ministry of Information. The division was designed to supervise the dissemination of information to foreign audiences in the hope of improving China's unfavourable international image. In its early days the division did not markedly advance China's foreign publicity, but when the American-trained Dong Xianguang was appointed head of this division in the mid-1930s, it became a much more effective propaganda organ.
Disturbed by foreign newspapers’ interpretations of the Jinan Incident, China's bilingual elites founded an English-language weekly, The China Critic, in Shanghai immediately after the end of the Jinan affair. The long-term editors of the journal included Gui Zhongshu, Lin Yutang, Ma Yinchu, Liu Dajun, Zhao Minheng, and many other distinguished scholars who had received their university degrees in the West. The editors defined themselves as ‘a small group of Chinese who are interested in a fair presentation of all issues arising between China and the other powers’, with hopes to ‘prevent the repetition of events that have made the month of May so unhappily memorable [due to the May Thirtieth Movement and the Jinan Incident]’.Footnote 150 Liu Dajun also confirmed in his letter to Hu Shi that the journal was published to ‘counter Japan's harmful propaganda’.Footnote 151 In the following years the journal indeed became an important outlet for China to champion its cause in the treaty ports and abroad.
Conclusion
China was defeated in the foreign propaganda battle over the Jinan Incident. Although China made various attempts to present its case in the press, its voice was drowned out by Japanese propaganda. China failed to channel its message effectively to English-language papers at home and abroad and its argument failed to win the support of the majority of the audience in the treaty ports. This failure can be attributed to China's disadvantages in text and context: China's inefficient dissemination of news and its indecisive propaganda policy greatly limited the quantity and quality of its discourse. The precedents of anti-imperialist action both diminished the credibility of its news and weakened its argument. Yet behind these disadvantages lay the root of the problem—the unsettled political situation. The constant changes of government thwarted China's official and nonofficial efforts to establish a national news network. The threat from the northern warlords and China's intricate relations with the imperialist powers deterred the Nanjing regime from formulating decisive foreign propaganda policies. The lack of coordination within the Nanjing government gave rise to inconsistent accounts in the press. Furthermore, its disputes with Western countries over national sovereignty impacted upon public opinion in treaty ports and abroad, estranging the very audience it sought to appeal to.
In contrast, Japan had a strong news network in China and quickly installed its version of events in the media. Its response was swift, consistent, and intensive. It also took the advantage of the Nanjing Incident to justify its actions in Jinan.
Opinion in the treaty ports towards the Jinan Incident was split between the British press and American journals, with the former supporting the Japanese argument and the latter favouring China's case. However, the support of American papers was unable to bolster China's position in this propaganda battle. It was still the Japanese reports, with the endorsement of the British treaty-port papers, that were widely accepted by The Times of London and influenced the view of The New York Times. Even the Manchester Guardian, which attempted to give a more balanced view, nevertheless retained an ambiguous attitude to the Incident, largely because of its reliance on reports by the Japanese agency.
This failure prompted the Nanjing government and non-official experts to improve China's foreign propaganda institutions. Their efforts would be more severely tested in the 1930s and beyond.
