By David Li, bostonese.com
San Francisco, Sept.18, 2014, — Today is the 83rd year anniversary of the “Sept. 18 Incident”, also known as the Mukden Incident, in Northeastern China. This incident led to Japanese occupation of three Chinese provinces: Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning for 14 years until Japan surrounded unconditionally at the end of WWII. The anniversary was marked in China and in Chinese American communities in the US.
Mr. Lei Liu shows an item to Ms. Florence Fang at the exhibit (photos from Mr. Dong’s blog).
Lei Liu, a Chinese American living in Fremont, southeastern part of San Francisco Bay Area held a personal exhibition yesterday. More than 400 items from the Anti-Japanese War were exhibited.
The Mukden Incident was a staged event engineered by rogue Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the Japanese invasion of the northeastern part of China, known as Manchuria, in 1931. On September 18, 1931, personnel within the Imperial Japanese Army staged an attack on a segment of Japanese-owned and operated railway near the city of Shenyang (then called Mukden), first blaming Chinese attackers, and then openly attacking Chinese military in the region, setting the pretext for the military takeover of Manchuria, in which Japan established its puppet state of Manchukuo six months later.
The ruse was soon exposed to the international community, leading Japan to diplomatic isolation. Japan later withdrew from the League of Nations in March 1933
Florence Fang, founder of the WWII Pacific War Memorial Hall in San Francisco, attended the exhibition. She said that the WWII Pacific War Memorial Hall will set aside some space for exhibiting the items from Mr. Liu’s collection once it opens next year.