Japan’s occupation of northern China was swift. Whether the war would spread beyond northern China remained uncertain. But Zhang Zhizhong, commander of the Shanghai-Nanking garrison and a former teacher at the Soviet-funded Whampoa Military Academy, who had been urging Chiang Kai-shek to attack vulnerable Japanese positions in Shanghai, staged his own incident: on August 9, 1937, a Chinese army unit shot and killed a Japanese lieutenant and private just outside the Shanghai airport. To make it seem as if the Japanese had fired first, a Chinese prisoner on death row was dressed in military uniform and executed at the airport gate. Zhang renewed his pressure on Chiang to engage in an all-out war with Japan, not just protect the north; Chiang demurred. Zhang staged bombing runs on Japanese ships, grounding aircraft and troops. Japanese reinforcements began to make their way to Shanghai. Chiang approached Moscow for a mutual assistance treaty. Stalin, wanting to prevent a Japanese conquest of China but not to entangle the Soviets in a direct war with Japan, agreed only to a nonaggression pact, which was signed in Nanking on August 21.148 (This was the same day a joint decree of the Council of People’s Commissars and the politburo ordered the deportation of all ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East.)149 On August 22, Japanese forces arrived in Shanghai.
America’s ambassador in Moscow reported to Washington that Litvinov had told Léon Blum that “he and the Soviet Union were perfectly delighted that Japan had attacked China,” and that “the Soviet Union hoped that war between China and Japan would continue just as long as possible.”150 Some suggested that Zhang Zhizhong was a Soviet agent who had provoked war on Moscow’s orders.151 (Chiang would force Zhang to resign in September 1937, but would not accuse him of being a foreign agent.) On September 14, the Soviets and Chiang signed an additional accord for the supply of Soviet weapons on $50 million in credits, with the proviso that one quarter to one fifth would go to the Chinese Red Army.152
After his release from the hostage-taking incident, Chiang had conceded the legality of the Chinese Communist forces, but now they would not be subordinated to his orders. The Communist army in the north, centered on Yan’an and numbering 46,000, was renamed the Eighth Route Army. On September 23, Chiang acknowledged a public declaration of the Chinese Communists, published in the Nationalist press the day before—a form of legalization. Mao, while paying lip service to the united front, planned a guerrilla war in the north independently of the Nationalists, effectively keeping his army out of the main brunt of the fighting.
Stalin, too, took advantage. He had already sent 5,000 Soviet troops, dressed in Chinese uniforms, to Xinjiang, provoking a rebellion against the pro-Soviet local puppet but also increasing the Soviet foothold.153 Chiang feared a Soviet pact with Japan to divide China—after all, the Soviets had already broken off Outer Mongolia from China—but he was more obliged than ever to tolerate Soviet encroachment.154 That’s because Stalin now agreed to sell desperately needed combat aircraft and to help with training, as in Spain, although in China’s case he did so on credit (altogether extending three separate loans to the Chinese government, totaling $250 million, to cover the costs).155 In the wake of Stalin’s military pullback from the ongoing civil war in Spain (Operation X), at least 450 Soviet pilots would be in China before the year was out (Operation Z).156 During the last few months of 1937, the USSR flew 297 fighter planes and bombers into Chinese airfields, while trucks and ships (via Canton) delivered nearly 300 cannons, 82 tanks, 400 vehicles, and a mass supply of arms and ammunition. Stalin also lent support to Chinese partisan units, to further tie down the Japanese, and ordered Comintern head Dimitrov, again, to rein in the revolutionary impulses of the Chinese Communist party.
Some 400 Uighur students, future Soviet agents for Chinese Xinjiang, were being schooled in Tashkent, but then the Uighurs were all executed in a single night. After murdering his own Xinjiang fifth column, Stalin blinded himself, recalling and executing his diplomats from half a dozen consulates across China’s western interior, including Ürümqi and Kashgar. Still, his position in Xinjiang strengthened as the Soviets oversaw construction of a nearly 2,000-mile road, completed in just months with Chinese coolie labor, from Sary-Ozek, Kazakhstan, through Ürümqi to Lanzhou, to transport war supplies to China’s anti-Japanese resistance.157
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