ABSTRACT
On the night of 18 September 1931, a minor explosion occurred on a section of the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway near Mukden (now Shenyang) in the north-east of China. Japanese troops, stationed in Manchuria since 1905 to protect the railway and its associated operations, moved swiftly and decisively to defend Japan’s interests. Meanwhile their leaders loudly asserted to the world that Chinese soldiers were responsible for the explosion, which was branded as only the latest in a series of anti-Japanese ‘outrages’. Actually, damage to the railway had been slight, and the ‘incident’ had in any case been perpetrated not by Chinese soldiers but by Japanese troops, as part of a wider plan to extend Japanese power in Manchuria. The explosion on the railway did in fact become a pretext for extensive military action against Chinese troops loyal to Nanking in the south. Fighting quickly spread across southern Manchuria, then to the northern region. International opinion was especially shocked by the aerial bombing of Chinchow, a city some distance from the original scene of the fighting, towards Peking, in October 1931. Within a few months of the explosion on the railway, all of Manchuria had fallen under Japanese control.
