Summer Learning Journey Week Two An Eventful Experience

By the mid-1939, Japan and China had already been engaged in full-scale war for nearly two years. The city of Tianjin had been captured by Japanese forces on 30 Jul 1937, but the Japanese Army had avoided the foreign concessions in order to prevent diplomatic complications. On 9 Apr 1939, a Chinese-national who was a manager and a customs official for the Japanese-controlled Federal Reserve Bank of North China, a man considered to be a collaborationist, was assassinated by Chinese resistance fighters at the Grand Theater. The Japanese soon named six Chinese men as the killers, and announced that they were hiding in the British concession. The Japanese Army demanded them to be handed over, and the British police complied, though asking the Japanese not to torture them and to return them in five days. Ignoring the first part of the agreement, the Japanese tortured the four men that the British police turned over, getting two of them to confess. Five days later, the Japanese returned the four men to the British concession as promised.