This Week in China's History: The December 9th Movement

Listen to my narration in the embedded audio player above!

Students were fed up.

Frustrated by a government they perceived to be corrupt and unable — unwilling? — to make good on its promises, they organized, determined that a show of popular frustration could change policies. From universities around the city — which had been China’s capital for most of the preceding five centuries — they converged on the center of the city. Defying official orders to disperse and return to their campuses, soon students from more than a dozen universities had found their way to Zhongnanhai, the center of power in China. In support, protests broke out in dozens of cities across the country.

It was not the spring of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, though. It was the winter of 1935. Tiananmen was just a gate — not yet a square — and the city we know as Beijing was then officially “Beiping,” or Peiping. Though Zhongnanhai was a critical site for China’s ruling elite, it was not then the home of its leaders. And rather than rallying to call for democracy and an end to corruption, these students were looking for a government that would stand up to a foreign invader, urging the ruling Guomindang (KMT) to ally with the Communists and fight the Japanese who were menacing China’s frontiers. The movement would take its name from the date they arrived at Zhongnanhai: December 9th.

The roots of the December 9th movement went back at least as far as Japan’s imperial ambitions. Japanese aggression against China had begun in earnest in 1894, when Japanese forces sank the Chinese steamship Kowshing, precipitating the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, which established Japan as a continental power by (effectively) colonizing Korea and seizing the Liaodong peninsula (although that occupation was rescinded under Western pressure). Japan then won another war in Manchuria — this time against Russia — to advance its interests there. Then, in 1931, elements in the Japanese army launched a false-flag operation near Shenyang — the so-called Mukden Incident — and invaded Manchuria, separating Northeast China from the rest of the Republic and installing the puppet regime of Manchukuo, with the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as its leader.

It was in many ways the response to the Mukden Incident and the invasion of Manchuria that led to December 9th. Chiang Kai-shek infamously ordered his military to retreat from ...