On July 7, 1937, the Japanese garrison at Lugou Bridge held a so-called military Xi exercise near the Chinese garrison position without informing the local Chinese authorities, and falsely claimed that a Japanese soldier was missing, and asked to enter Wanping County, southwest of Beiping, to search, but the Chinese garrison sternly refused, and the Japanese army immediately launched an attack on Wanping City and Lugou Bridge. The 219th Regiment of the 37th Division of the 29th Army of the Chinese garrison fought back and put up stubborn resistance. The "77 Incident" opened the prelude to the National War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
Since the September 18 Incident in 1931, the Japanese invaders invaded and annexed China's northeast, and in order to further provoke a full-scale war of aggression against China, they have successively transported troops into the customs. By 1936, the Japanese army had forcibly occupied Shanhaiguan and rapidly advanced southward. The Japanese army in the Northeast and North China was combined to form the North China Front, with Terauchi Shouichi as the commander. At this time, China's Chiang Kai-shek clique was extremely afraid that the Japanese forces would penetrate deep into the heart of China, so they pursued the policy of "settling the inside before attacking the outside world" and encircled and suppressed the Communist Party and the Red Army.
In North China, many of the squadrons were the Northwest Army and the Jin Sui Army, and Chiang Kai-shek's ** Army was mostly stationed in East China and South China. At the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japan, Chiang Kai-shek further upgraded the policy of "settling the outside world before securing the interior" into a strategy of "protracted attrition" in an attempt to achieve the goal of "exchanging space for time". At this time, the Kuomintang strategically carried out internal operations and concentrated most of its main forces along the Songhu line, so that a situation of "passive resistance to Japan and active resistance" was formed strategically.
On August 1, 1935, the Communist Party of China issued the "Letter to the Compatriots of the Whole Country for Resisting Japan and Saving the Country", calling on the whole country to stop the civil war and unite to resist Japan abroad.
After the outbreak of the Xi'an Incident on December 12, 1936, Chiang Kai-shek ordered a crusade against Zhang Xueliang, and announced that the pro-Japanese Wang Chonghui would take the opportunity of going to Guangdong to mourn Hu Hanmin, and demanded that the Guangdong Military and Political Administrations hand over the military and political powersTang Enbo was in Shanghai preparing to attack Xi'an;The Japanese aggressors were ready to intervene by force;Bai Chongxi raised troops to attack Xi'an in the name of crusading against Zhang Xueliang;Feng Yuxiang, Liu Xiang, Li Zongren, and Hu Hanmin all sent messages to support Zhang Xueliang;In order to promote Chiang Kai-shek's resistance to Japan, the Communist Party also sent *** to Xi'an to participate in the settlement of the incident.
Under these circumstances, Chiang Kai-shek was forced to accept the idea of stopping the civil war and uniting with the Communists to resist Japan, and the Xi'an Incident became a peaceful settlement. The peaceful resolution of the Xi'an Incident became the pivot of the change of the current situation. It smashed the conspiracy of the pro-Japanese faction and Japanese imperialism and played a major role in promoting the Kuomintang and the Communist Party to cooperate again. Since then, the situation of the 10-year civil war has basically ended, and domestic peace has been initially realized. Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, two patriotic generals, also went down in history because of this.
The peaceful settlement of the Xi'an Incident prepared the necessary prerequisites for the establishment of the anti-Japanese national united front and became a turning point from the civil war to the anti-Japanese national war.