Yellow River 60 kilometers north-east of Jinan on December 23, 1937. Han Fuju abandoned Jinan on the next day against orders to hold the city to the death. He ordered the offices of the provincial government and the Japanese consulate in Jinan to be burned down and the ensuing power vacuum led to widespread looting in the city. Japanese troops from the 10th Division of the Manchurian Area Army entered Jinan on December 27, 1937.
Japanese troops controlled Jinan until their defeat in 1945. After this, the Kuomintang regained a short-lived control of the city during the period from 1946 to 1948. The provincial government during this time was led by Lieutenant-General Wang Yaowu, who also commanded the KMT army in the region. KMT rule over Jinan ended in September 1948 with the Battle of Jinan in which units of the People's Liberation Army under the command of Chen Yi took the city. The battle for Jinan took a decisive turn in favor of the attackers when KMT Lieutenant-General Wú Huàwén defected to the Communist side with about 8,000 of his troops. The most likely explanation for his defection is that he had been pressured through relatives of his who were held captive by the Communist forces. Lieutenant-General Wu had been in charge of the vital outer ring of defenses that protected the main airfield, the railroad station, and the commercial district. With these critical assets lost, the situation of the city's defenders became untenable. Following the weakening of the city's defenses, the People's Liberation Army breached the city wall and entered Jinan on September 24, 1948.
In March 1966, the largest among the drawn-out sequence of earthquakes that made up the Xingtai Earthquake damaged about 36,000 houses in Jinan.
On May 27, 1966, the Cultural Revolution started in Jinan with an article in the local newspaper "Jinan Evening News"that denounced vice-governor Yu Xiu as a Bourgeois agent within the government. Starting from early June 1966,
