A Forgotten Chinese Hero: Zhang Xueliang

The Xi’an Incident changed the course of Chinese history.
By
December 28, 2020
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Two generals and their men kidnap their leader and force him into an alliance with his sworn enemy in order to fight an even greater enemy. This is not the plot of an action movie – although an award-winning film about the event did come out in 1981. This is the true story of the Xi’an Incident, which took place from December 12, 1936 until Christmas Day.
In 1936, the Communists and Nationalists were at war. At the same time, however, the Japanese had already begun their invasion of China. Manchuria in northeast China fell to Japan in 1931 and a Japanese puppet state – Manchukuo – was established the following year. And, yet, the Republic of China’s Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, was solely focused not on the external threat of encroaching Japanese troops, but on the domestic threats to his own personal leadership. In a telling example of how little attention Chiang was giving Japan at the time, they were not even officially considered to be at war. The “official” start of the Sino-Japanese War would not come until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in Beijing in 1937.

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