Friday marks the 95th anniversary of the September 18 Incident, the beginning of China’s 14-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
Also known as the Mukden Incident, it began on the night of September 18, 1931, when troops from Japan’s Kwantung Army detonated explosives on a section of the South Manchuria Railway at Liutiaohu, on the northern outskirts of Shenyang, the capital of northeast China’s Liaoning Province.
Japanese troops falsely blamed Chinese forces for the explosion and used it as a pretext to attack the nearby Beidaying barracks and bombard Shenyang. The city fell to Japanese forces the following day.