NOTES

NOTES

1. Under the influence of the Chinese Red Army and the people's anti-Japanese movement, the Kuomintang's Northeastern Army headed by Chang Hsueh-liang and the Kuomintang's 17th Route Army headed by Yang Hu-cheng agreed to the anti-Japanese national united front proposed by the Communist Party of China and demanded that Chiang Kai-shek should unite with the Communist Party to resist Japan. He refused, became still more active in his military preparations for the "suppression of the Communists" and massacred young people in Sian who were anti-Japanese. Chang Hsueh-liang and Yang Hu-cheng took joint action and arrested Chiang Kai-shek. This was the famous Sian Incident of December 12, 1936. He was forced to accept the terms of unity with the Communist Party and resistance to Japan, and was then set free to return to Nanking.

2. The Chinese "punitive" group consisted of the pro-Japanese cements in the Kuomintang government in Nanking who tried to wrest power from Chiang Kai-shek during the Sian Incident. With Wang Ching-wei and Ho Yiag-chin as their leaders, they advocated a "punitive expedition" against Chang Hsueh-liang and Yang Hu-cheng. Availing themselves of the incident, they prepared to start large-scale civil war in order to dear the way for the Japanese invaders and wrest political power from Chiang Kai-shek.

3. Seven leaders of the patriotic anti-Japanese movement in Shanghai had been arrested by Chiang Kai-shek's government in November 1936. They were Shen Chun-ju, Chang Nai-chi, Tsou Tao-fen, Li Kung-pu, Sha Chien-li, Shih Liang and Wang Tsao-shih. They were kept in prison till July 1937.

4. Wang Ching-wei was the head of the pro-Japanese group in the Kuomintang. He had stood for compromise with the Japanese imperialists ever since their invasion of the Northeast in 1931. In December 1938 he left Chungking, openly capitulated to the Japanese invaders, and set up a puppet government in Nanking.

5. Ho Ying-chin, a Kuomintang warlord, was another leader of the pro-Japanese group. During the Sian Incident he actively plotted civil war by deploying Kuomintang troops for an attack on Shensi along the Lunghai Railway. He planned to kill Chiang Kai-shek by bombing Sian, in order to take over Chiang's position.

6. T.V. Soong was a pro-American member of the Kuomintang. Championing U.S. interests he, too, favoured a peaceful settlement of the Sian Incident, because U.S. imperialism was at loggerheads with Japanese imperialism with which it was then contending for supremacy in the Far East.

7. This letter sternly criticized the Kuomintang's reactionary rule and the decisions of the Second Plenary Session of its Central Executive Committee. It also set out the Communist Party's policy of forming an anti-Japanese national united front and renewing its co-operation with the Kuomintang. The main part of the letter reads: