Kidnapping China's President: The Xi'an Incident of 1936

Dr Elisabeth Forster is coming to Portsmouth Guildhall on Tuesday 10 November to talk about the Xi'an Incident of 1936, the moment China's president Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by two of his own generals. It's one of those historical episodes that sounds like a fever dream when you first hear it, and the details don't make it any more believable. Chiang, the Generalissimo, was thoroughly humiliated: he left his dentures behind in a failed escape attempt and injured his back so badly that he suffered for the rest of his life.

The kidnappers didn't fare much better. One was assassinated alongside his family in 1949, and the other spent decades under house arrest until the 1990s. It's easy to read that as a breakdown of military discipline, but Forster frames it as a political statement. The generals wanted to shift Chiang's priorities in his war against the Chinese Communist Party and against Japan, and they were willing to kidnap their own leader to make it happen. She'll be drawing on her 2024 book, After Watergate, to tell the story.

Forster is a lecturer in Chinese history at Southampton University, so she knows the ground this sits on. The talk is part of the Portsmouth Historical Association's 2026/27 series, which runs from October through to May. It's a straightforward setup: no booking needed, just turn up and pay on the night. The session starts at 7pm in Room 1.09 of the Park Building on King Henry I Street, and it'll be finished by 8.30pm. A single lecture is £4, or you can do the whole series for £20; students and HA members pay nothing.