Kweilin incident

Cause and effects

It was speculated that the reason for the attack was to assassinate Chinese President Sun Yat-sen's only son, Sun Fo, who was expected to be on the Kweilin. In fact Sun Fo had taken an earlier flight that day with a different airline, Eurasia. Sun Fo later claimed a secretary had made a mistake and had publicly announced the wrong flight. It was speculated that Sun Fo intentionally announced his departure on the wrong plane, in effect sacrificing the Kweilin so that his real flight could travel unmolested. While the Japanese government never officially acknowledged why or if they attacked the Kweilin, they said henceforth that while they took care they would not accept responsibility for civilian aircraft flying in a war zone. The Japanese Foreign Office claimed not to have fired on the aircraft but to have chased it as it was behaving suspiciously. A Japanese-language newspaper, The Hong Kong Nippo, admitted that although Sun Fo was the object of the attack, "our wild eagles intended to capture [him] alive."

Three prominent Chinese bankers were among the passengers killed in the incident. They were Hu Yun (Hu Bijiang), Chairman of the Bank of Communications; Xu Xinliu, General Manager of The National Commercial Bank; and Wang Yumei, an executive of the Central Bank of the Republic of China. Their deaths were a significant loss to the Chinese banking industry.

The incident was widely reported, due, in part, to its novelty as the first time a civilian airliner had ever been brought down by hostile aircraft. A popular newsreel, titled Kweilin Tragedy, showed to sell-out crowds for weeks in Hong Kong. It had an interview with Woods and showed the "mutilated airplane, scattered mail bags, and bullet-riddled corpses." After the incident, CNAC and other carriers began making night flights over China, using a new technology developed in Germany, "Lorenz", that allowed pilots to follow an auditory radio homing-beacon to the destination. There was diplomatic outrage over the incident. In the United States, it helped solidify the popular view the Japan was morally wrong in the war against China, but the incident was not enough to spur the US into action against Japan despite Chinese entreaties.

On 6 September an aircraft of the Sino-German Eurasian Aviation Company was attacked near Liuzhou by Japanese fighters while flying from Hong Kong to Yunnan. The company had already stopped flights to Hankou after the Kweilin attack.