Xi'an Incident

The Xi'an Incident^[a] was a major Chinese political crisis from 12 to 26 December 1936. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government of China, was placed under house arrest in the city of Xi'an by a Nationalist army he was there to review. Chiang's captors hoped to end the Chinese Civil War and confront Japanese imperial expansion into Chinese territory. After two weeks of intense negotiations between Chiang, his captors, and representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chiang was released with a verbal promise to end the civil war and put up a firmer resistance to Japan.

Before the incident, Chiang Kai-shek had followed a strategy of "first internal pacification, then external resistance" that entailed eliminating the CCP before confronting Japanese aggression. This strategy was deeply unpopular among many groups in China, including the Northeastern Army tasked with suppressing the main Communist base in Yan'an. The Northeastern Army was mainly composed of troops exiled from Manchuria after that region was invaded by Japan in 1931. Northeastern Army soldiers and officers had also begun to fraternize with the Communists and were convinced of the need for a united Nationalist-Communist front against Japan.

The commanders of the Northeastern Army, Generals Chang Hsüeh-liang and Yang Hucheng, decided to kidnap Chiang after the latter refused repeated entreaties to change his policies. Chang invited Chiang to come review the Northeastern Army, and after Chiang arrived, had him placed under house arrest at the Huaqing Pool complex. Some radical army officers wanted Chiang executed, but both Chang and the CCP strongly opposed such a move. They wanted to pressure Chiang into changing his policies instead. Zhou Enlai led the Communist negotiating team, which after two weeks agreed to release Chiang. Although Chiang publicly repudiated the verbal promises he made in Xi'an, a ceasefire was declared and talks with Zhou continued. The rapprochement between the Communists and Nationalists outraged the Japanese, and eventually helped lead to the Second Sino-Japanese War. The full-scale Japanese invasion hastened the formal joining of the two Chinese factions in the Second United Front.
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