September 18, 1931
It was quiet near Liutiao He, a lake near Mukden, Manchuria.
Lieutenant Kawamoto Suemori took a couple of men and placed a small charge of
dynamite near Japan’s South Manchurian Railway tracks. Japan had received
control of this railway, on Chinese soil, from white men who didn’t care what
happened to anyone they could define as yellow.
Two colonels in Tokyo wanted to make sure that Japan could
take over all of Manchuria, so the Manchurians could grow crops for consumption
by the superior race that lived in Tokyo.
The blast didn’t really do very much and the tracks were in
good shape when the next train went by. In Tokyo they said the Liutiao Railway
Bridge had been knocked down by Chinese dissidents. There hadn’t been any
Chinese near the blast area and it wasn’t a bridge. The blast didn’t really hurt
anything or anyone, but now the Japanese had an excuse to take over all of
Manchuria.
Chiang Kai-Shek had
ordered Zhang Xueliang, the young marshal of Manchuria, not to resist but let
the Japanese take all the area that ended at the Black Dragon River. The Back Dragon River was China’s border with
Russia.
And so the slow dismantling of China began, a natural
evolution since the Opium Wars let England and others seize Chinese ports for
their countries.
The people of China were very angry about their country’s
position and felt a communal loss of face. In Shanghai they started boycotting
any products from the land of the rising sun.
The Japanese had decided that the Chinese were a weak
people, undeserving of being treated honorably by their army, so the road to
the Rape of Nanjing was under construction. In Heaven the Gods wept for the
Chinese people.
From "Shanghai Rose"
http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Whitney-Turner/e/B004G7E40U/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
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