It is often said that the Second World War began
in China in 1931. And that the global rise of
fascism first blossomed into external aggression
when Japan attacked China; then the tide of
war spread to Europe and Africa, to Abyssinia
and Spain, until Hitler unleashed the Second
World War by marching into Poland in 1939.
Undeniably there was some interdependence of
European and Asian events in the 1930s. Britain
and the US were in a sense sandwiched between
conflicts on the European continent and eastern
Asia, with vast interests bound up in the future of
both worlds, West and East. But to view the
earlier history of eastern Asia from the point of
view of the European war of 1939 is to see that
history from a Western focus, and thus to distort
it. The problems of eastern Asia were coming to
a head irrespective of the rise of fascism and
Nazism. The problems of Europe, too, had independent
roots.
Seen through Japanese and Chinese eyes
Western policies appeared to change with confusing
rapidity in the first three decades of the twentieth
century. Conscious of their military and
industrial weakness in comparison with the West,
the Chinese and Japanese accordingly had to calculate
how best to adapt to constantly shifting
external conditions. Critical, too, was the question
of what their relationship to each other
should be. All these problems arising from ‘modernisation’
and changing external and internal
Asian relationships were to reach explosive intensity
during the 1930s. The different strands can
be seen more clearly if separated.
In Japan the orderly coherent structure of
national government and decision-making began
to fall apart in 1930. Extremism and lawlessness
and a decentralisation of power occurred. Japan’s
disintegration was political and internal. In China
there was physical disintegration. No ‘government’
of the ‘republic’ of China could rule the
whole vast country. Foreign control had been
established over China’s principal ports during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and over
Manchuria, Outer Mongolia and Tibet. To add
to these setbacks Chiang Kai-shek and his
Kuomintang Party became involved in civil war
after breaking with the communists. Then there
were constant conflicts between the greater and
lesser warlords who ruled much of China as
military-feudal commanders in the 1930s. Chiang
Kai-shek fought some of these warlords but
was never strong enough to control them or
their armies. Most made their peace with him,
however, by assenting to nominal allegiance
to him and his government of the Republic of
China, while continuing to rule independently
over their fiefs large and small.
From 1928 to 1937, while Chiang Kai-shek
established his capital and government in
Nanking, no unified Chinese Republic really
existed; his reforms had made an impact on urban
life but did not reach millions of peasants. His
vision of a unified China bore no relationship to
reality. To the Western world he nevertheless
embodied China; his ambassadors were accredited
to other countries and represented China at the
League of Nations in Geneva. Here it was that
Chiang Kai-shek sought to mobilise the help of
the Western powers when in 1931 the Japanese
began transforming their special rights in
Manchuria into outright occupation and control
of the province. The issue appeared to be a simple
one for the Western powers of supporting the
League and China against Japanese aggression.
The contrast between the real condition of China
and its international legal position, together with
its image in the eyes of the public in the Western
world, was one critical factor in the eastern Asia
crisis of the 1930s.
The struggle between a central power claiming
to speak for and to rule China and regional
and provincial rulers was nothing new in modern
Chinese history; the contest between integration
and disintegration had been going on for decades
and continued until 1949. China’s chronic weakness
had allowed the European powers to establish
colonies and special rights in Shanghai and
other treaty ports. Since the beginning of the
century the Japanese leaders had been conscious
of a great divide in their options for a China
policy. Japan could identify with China as a fellow
Asian nation and help it to achieve independence
from the ‘white’ imperialists; or it could copy the
Western imperialists and join them in acquiring
colonial possessions and ‘spheres of influence’ in
China. To combine with China after dominating
it meant certain conflict with the more powerful
Western powers. Japan’s best interests seemed to
be served by emulating the Western powers and
joining in the scramble for China. This meant
participating fully in Western great-power diplomacy,
which Japan did when concluding an
alliance with Britain in 1902. Britain for its part
welcomed the Japanese alliance to check Russia
and to preserve its own position in China. After
the Russo-Japanese war three years later Japan
acquired its own considerable empire by annexing
Korea and by replacing Russia and carving out
a sphere of interest in southern Manchuria.
During the next fifteen years the Japanese sought
to extend their influence in northern China in
agreement with the Russians and at China’s
expense. The First World War gave Japan its
biggest opportunity and for the first time its
ambition now encompassed controlling the government
of China itself. But hostile Chinese and
international reactions forced the Japanese to
withdraw from these extreme pretensions. This
was a blow. Worse was the army’s profitless
Siberian intervention from 1918 to 1922. It had
brought neither glory nor gain.
The Japanese in the 1920s then appeared
ready to limit their empire to what they already
held with the acknowledgement of the Western
powers, and beyond this to work with the
Western powers within an agreed framework of
international treaties, military and territorial. At
the Washington Conference of 1921–2 this
framework was set up. Japan accepted an inferior
ratio of battleships to Britain and the US (3:5:5),
but this inferiority was counterbalanced by the
agreement of Britain and the US not to build any
naval bases in the Western Pacific. Then the
Japanese also signed the Nine-Power Treaty
(1922) whereby the powers undertook ‘to respect
the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial
and the administrative integrity of China’,
and not to take ‘advantage of conditions in
China’ to seek special rights or create ‘spheres of
influence’. But what of existing rights? The
Western powers were not about to relinquish
their rights in Shanghai. Japan also interpreted
the treaty as not affecting its existing rights and
‘special interests’ which, the US had acknowledged
in the past, it should exercise wherever its
own territories were close to China’s.
Since the opening of the twentieth century the
US had tried to secure the consent of the other
powers with interests in China to two propositions.
First, they should allow equal economic
opportunity to all foreign nations wishing to trade
in China (the Open Door). The behaviour of the
foreign nations, however, showed that this ‘equal
opportunity’ was not extended to the Chinese
themselves, who did not exercise sovereign power
over all Chinese territory. Second, the US urged
that China should not be further partitioned
(respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity),
but in practice the US had acknowledged Japan’s
special rights and spheres of influence. The
second proposition was more a moral hope than
real politics. Nevertheless, these principles were
not abandoned. They were reasserted in the
1920s and 1930s.
For Japan, the Washington treaties of 1921–2
stabilised international conduct towards disintegrating
China and lessened the chance of conflict
with the Western powers. Japan would now maintain
its existing rights against a new possible
threat, Bolshevik Russia, without fear of conflict
with Britain and the US. A third reason for
Japan’s peaceful adaptation to the entirely new
post-war world was its inability to compete in a
naval race with the US. Japanese finances were
exhausted. Japan was dependent on the West to
a degree matched by few modern nations. Its
capacity to modernise was at the mercy of the
Western powers, especially the US. A Japanese
journalist in 1929 summed up Japan’s position,
reflecting views widely held at the time:
Japan is a country whose territory is small and
whose resources are scarce. It has to depend
upon other countries for securing such materials.
Furthermore, to sustain the livelihood of
its excessive population, Japan finds it imperative
to place a high priority upon exporting its
products abroad.
The worldwide depression hit Japan less seriously
than the West. Japan had an industrious and wellorganised
people to further economic progress.
With the help of a large devaluation of its currency,
it had pulled out of the slump by 1932.
But now the need for capital, especially from
the US, and for raw materials (cotton, coal, iron
ore and oil) from abroad became increasingly
essential. The Japanese believed that their own
continued economic existence, the ability of
the nation to progress, depended on developing
the resources of Manchuria (where the
Japanese could secure some of the raw materials
they needed) and on continued access to the
American market. The heavy rearmament programme
launched in 1936 and the needs of the
military in China, moreover, could not be sustained
without American imports of scrap metal
and oil. Thus, the poverty of resources was
Japan’s Achilles heel.
Recognition of this weakness united the
Japanese leadership in the military, business,
diplomacy, bureaucracy and politics in one aim:
that Japan had to maintain its economic empire
in China. Four-fifths of all Japan’s overseas investment
at the close of 1929 was in China. On the
importance of China there was no difference
between the ‘pacific’ 1920s and the militaristic
1930s. The rift occurred between the leaders who
argued that Japan could achieve this while staying
within the legal framework of treaties and concessions
held in common with the West, and
those who wished to extend the Japanese economic
empire not only at China’s expense but
regardless too of Western economic interests in
China. The whole of eastern Asia and southeastern
Asia would become a Japanese-dominated
empire serving Japan’s interests under the highsounding
guise of a cooperative Japanese commonwealth
of Asian nations called the Greater
Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Foreign Minister
Matsuoka of the later 1930s, looking at Western
behaviour with its earlier emphasis on imperialism
and its later support for the League of Nations,
simply derided it as a cynical way of changing the
rules of international law to suit the West’s own
selfish interests. ‘The Western Powers had taught
the Japanese the game of poker’, he once
remarked, but then, ‘after acquiring most of the
chips they pronounced the game immoral and
took up contract bridge.’
One significant strand in Japanese thinking
about the world was the belief that only by its own
endeavours would Japan be accepted as an equal
of the ‘white’ world powers, which did not treat it
as an equal. It was still in the process of catching
up militarily and industrially with the leading
Western nations; to survive among the world
powers it must grow in strength or go under.
Since the days of Meiji, Japan, for all its later talk
of Asian cooperation against the West, did not
seek a new role as the leading anti-imperialist
nation; it wanted to join the imperialist powers
and foresaw a partition of the whole world among
them. In that partition Japan and its empire would
dominate Asia. Now inevitably this set Japan on a
collision course with Western possessions and
economic interests in Asia. Against the European
imperialist nations, Japan, though weaker than
their combined strength, had a chance of success.
Just as the weaker US in the eighteenth century
had made itself dominant in the Western hemisphere
– a parallel not lost on Japan – by taking
advantage of Europe’s distress, of Europe’s great
internecine wars, so Japan in the twentieth century
would profit from the conflicts of Europe. But
unlike in the eighteenth century, there was one
great power now outside the European continent.
The fulfilment of Japanese ambitions came to
depend on the US.
American policy in Asia in the twentieth century
has been beset by confusion and contradictions.
Paradoxically, one basic tenet of American policy
– to uphold the unity and national independence
of China in the face of Japanese and European
ambitions of piecemeal territorial partition – triumphed
in 1949 with the communist victory. For
the first time in the century the Chinese mainland
was then fused into national unity. What the
Americans had always maintained, that China
rightly belonged to the Chinese, had come about.
China was set on the road to joining the world’s
great nations. Only a vestigial presence remained
of the former Western imperial era – Portuguese
Macao and British Hong Kong – and both outposts
were returned to full Chinese control by the
end of the century. The Chinese became masters
of their own internal economic development,
their trading relations and their policy towards the
outside world. The fulfilment of the Americans’
objectives was followed by more than two decades
of bitter dispute between the US and China,
including war in Korea. One reason for past ambiguities
in US policy was that it was rooted in the
genuine desire for eventual Chinese unity on
the one hand and equal commercial opportunities
for all Western powers on the other. During the
1920s and 1930s the US was determined to participate
in a share of China’s market, whose
potential was believed to be of critical importance
for future Western prosperity.
In 1930 American investment in China, concentrated
in Shanghai, was less than American
investment in Japan. The Japanese had also
acquired rights and privileges, especially in southern
Manchuria, based on the Japanese control of
the south Manchurian railway and the concessions
that went with it. But these rights in Manchuria
could not compare with the outright colonial possessions
of the European powers acquired by force
from a weak China in the nineteenth century, or
the semi-colonial ‘extra-territorial rights’ which
the Europeans and Japanese enjoyed in the treaty
ports. In southern Manchuria, Japanese control
was not absolute but had to be attained by manipulating
China’s difficulties and working through
the local Manchurian warlord. Thus, what came to
be regarded as the ‘nation’s lifeline’ was threatened
by chaotic conditions and the internal conflicts of
China. The Japanese in the 1920s considered
China’s claims to Manchuria to be purely nominal,
arguing that without Japan’s defeat of Russia
Manchuria would have been annexed by Russia in
1905 and that Japan’s presence in Manchuria for a
quarter of a century had ensured peace there. That
was not the view of the US, which upheld China’s
sovereignty over Manchuria; it should be preserved
for a future time when China had overcome its
internal problems.
But successive American presidents from
Theodore to Franklin Roosevelt never contemplated
the possibility that America’s commercial
or strategic interests were sufficiently large in
China to justify the US’s defending them by force
of arms and so risking war with Japan. It was not
in defence of American interests in China that the
Pacific War of 1941 to 1945 was fought. For
Franklin Roosevelt much wider and more fundamental
issues were at stake. These were based on
American ideological assumptions which were
neither shared nor understood in Japan. The fascinating
account of American–Japanese relations
from 1939 to 1941 needs to be related later
where it belongs chronologically.
With the onset of the depression after 1927,
Japan was beset by additional problems. Though
industry recovered more quickly than elsewhere
in the world, the farmers suffered severely. The
domestic silk industry provided an important
additional income for the peasantry and the price
of silk plunged in the US. The countryside
became the breeding ground for militarism. A
strident nationalism, a sort of super Japanese
patriotism with a return to emperor-worship,
marks the 1930s. It unified most of the Japanese
people. Harsh repression in any case ensured
broad conformity, and the educational system was
geared to uphold military national values. The
more ‘liberal’ tendencies of the 1920s, which saw
a strengthening of the Diet, of political parties, of
the influence of big business (the zaibatsu) on
politics, of the civilian politicians as against the
military, was engulfed by the new militaristic
nationalism.
All these changes occurred without any formal
changes in the Meiji constitution. It had never
been a part of that constitution to guarantee personal
liberties and thereby to limit the powers of
the state. Whenever necessary, censorship and
control were instituted. The Japanese were taught
to obey the state, and patriotism centred on the
veneration of the emperor. But it was characteristic
of formal Japanese institutions and laws that
they allowed for flexibility. The fount of all power,
however, remained the emperor. Whichever
group succeeded in speaking in his name could
wrap itself in his unchallengeable authority. The
Meiji Emperor had taken a real role in the decisions
of crucial national policies on the advice of
his elder statesmen, the genro. The position of his
successors was weaker. Emperor Hirohito was elevated
to an object of worship and, as a god, was
thereby moved away from practical influence on
national affairs. Temperamentally gentle and
scholarly, the emperor followed rather than
controlled the tide of events.
Despite the introduction of male suffrage,
Japan was not about to turn into a parliamentary
constitutional state in the 1920s. Its uniqueness as
a society, blending emperor-worship and authority
with elected institutions, was not essentially
changed by any democratic demands. A Peace
Preservation Law imposed severe prison penalties
on anyone who even advocated such a change. So
the description of the 1920s as the years of Taisho
Democracy is a misnomer. The people were not
prepared or encouraged to think that they should
decide the policies of the state through their
elected parties in the parliament. Thus the political
parties had no real roots and were the easy victims
of military reaction in the 1930s.
There was a real difference between the policies
pursued by the Japanese in the 1920s and
those followed in the 1930s due to the change of
balance among the groups that exercised power
in the state. The army and navy were not subject
to the control of the government but, through
the right of separate access to the emperor, constituted
a separate position of power. The informal
genro had coordinated civilian and military
aspects of national affairs. With the passing of the
original genro through the deaths of its members,
no other body advising the emperor was ever
again able to exercise such undisputed overall
control. The civilian politicians, leaning for
support on parliament and backed by some moderates
in the army and navy, in the 1920s gained
the upper hand over the more extreme officers in
the navy and army. It found expression in
Shidehara’s foreign policy and especially in the
naval disarmament treaties of the Washington
Conference. But both in the Kwantung army stationed
in Manchuria and in the navy a violent
reaction to civilian control was forming.
From 1928 until 1936 the leadership groups
were caught in cross-currents of violent conflict.
They were no longer able to provide a unified
Japanese policy. So there is the contrast between
the outwardly unified nation embodied in the
emperor’s supremacy and the breakdown of government
culminating in the assassination of those
politicians who had fallen foul of nationalist
extremists. The army was no longer under unified
control. The army command in Tokyo was rent
by conspiracies to encourage the Kwantung army
to act on its own in Manchuria regardless of the
policy of the government. In 1928 the Kwantung
army attempted to seize military control over
Manchuria and so to anticipate Chiang Kai-shek’s
attempts to extend his rule by conquest or diplomacy.
Chiang Kai-shek might decide to strike a
deal with the Manchurian warlord at the expense
of Japan’s ambitions. The Japanese Kwantung
army command organised the warlord’s murder
by blowing up the train on which he was travelling.
Although at the time there was an aggres-
sive Japanese government in power ready to use
military force in China to prevent northern China
from falling under Chiang Kai-shek’s control, the
Kwantung army had overreached itself and its
attempt to take over Manchuria was disavowed.
The murdered warlord’s son took over control of
the Chinese Manchurian administration and
army. A more moderate Japanese government
came to power in 1929 and the pacific Shidehara
returned to the Foreign Ministry. The army
smarted under its humiliation. But the Kwantung
army was not punished – the colonel in command
was merely retired – and two years later, in
September 1931, it struck again more effectively.
Meanwhile the new Cabinet of Prime Minister
Hamaguchi was soon involved in a confrontation
with the navy. The government had consented to
a new treaty of naval limitation at the London
Conference of 1930, this time applying to cruisers.
The Japanese navy had not secured the ratio
of cruisers that the chief of the naval general staff,
Admiral Kato Kanji, and those naval officers
who supported him, considered indispensable.
The navy minister, another admiral, supported
the prime minister, who won after months of
bitter debate.
The split into factions even within the armed
services themselves is illustrated by this whole
episode. It ended tragically when a nationalist
fanatic shot Hamaguchi, who lingered several
months before succumbing to his wounds.
In September 1931 the insubordination of the
Kwantung garrison army in Manchuria attracted
the attention of the world. Its plot to seize
Manchuria by force from theoretical Chinese
suzerainty and the warlord’s actual control was an
ill-kept secret. The government in Tokyo was
powerless. Shidehara received worthless assurances
from the war minister that the plot would
be quashed. In fact, there was sympathy within
the army general staff for the plotters. During
the night of 18 and 19 September the Japanese
themselves blew up the tracks of the South
Manchurian Railway just outside Mukden in
Manchuria. On this flimsy pretext the Kwantung
army attacked the Chinese and occupied Mukden.
The Japanese army in Korea now concerted with
the Kwantung army, and units crossed into
Manchuria. Soon the whole of Manchuria was
under military administration.
If this action had been the work of only
the middle-ranking subordinate officers of the
Kwantung army, then the government in Tokyo
might have re-established its authority. The conspiracy
at Mukden extended to the army leadership
in Tokyo. Government was disintegrating.
Shidehara tried to hide this fact from the outside
world and to make the diplomatic best of it. The
difficulty that Shidehara and the politicians, supported
by big business, faced was also in part selfmade.
While they strongly disapproved of the
armies’ insubordination and interference in
politics, as well as their resort to force, they held
in common with the army the belief in Japan’s
China destiny. The army was pursuing essentially
the same goals as they. Only their means differed.
Internally the army was out of control and followed
its own policy of solving Japan’s China
policy by force. In February 1932 it set up a
puppet state which it called Manchukuo and so
declared that Manchuria was severed from
Chinese sovereignty. Then it placed the last boy
emperor of the ousted Manchu dynasty, with the
unlikely name of Henry Pu-yi, on the puppet
throne. Possibly the motive for this bizarre move
was to have a useful symbol under their control
who might be put forward as a Japanese-backed
emperor of China. During the next few years the
army’s ambitions were not limited to securing
Japan’s rights in southern Manchuria. The
Kwantung army was soon extending Japanese
influence beyond Manchuria, which was completely
conquered by 1933. The Great Wall, the
ancient traditional defensive boundary which the
Chinese had built to keep out the northern barbarians,
proved no barrier to the Japanese. The
Japanese army crossed the Great Wall along the
railway line running from Mukden in Manchuria
to Peking.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government
was far too weak to oppose the Kwantung army
by force. In many provinces warlords persisted in
exercising power and the communists, from the
bases they had established, disputed the Kuomintang’s
right to speak for and unite China.
Resistance against Japan would be hopeless unless
China could first be effectively united, and this
became Chiang Kai-shek’s priority. He was therefore
glad of a truce, which the Japanese were
ready to conclude with the Nationalist government
in May 1933. Chiang Kai-shek concentrated
his forces against the communist stronghold
in the south, to crush peasant uprisings
and the Red Army. He almost succeeded in the
autumn of 1934. But the Red Army broke
through the encircling Nationalist armies and set
out on the epic Long March, a military manoeuvre
without parallel in the annals of history. The
Red Army and the communist political and
administrative cadres, about 50,000 people in all,
sought safety from the pursuing Nationalist forces
by walking a long circuitous route to the last surviving
communist base in the north-west of
China. They had to fight all the way. The distance
that this army covered, through mountains and
swamps, in heat and freezing cold, was almost
6,000 miles. The Long March took just over a
year to accomplish and of the 80,000 who had
set out possibly only 9,000 reached Yan’an in
Shaanxi in October 1935, though others joined
on the way. In this province Mao Zedong then
rebuilt the Communist movement from an initial
nucleus of 20,000 to the eventual millions that
drove Chiang Kai-shek’s armies from the mainland
in 1949.
The Kwantung army meanwhile was not idle.
It was rapidly expanded from 10,000 officers and
men in 1931 to 164,000 in 1935 and by 1941 it
had reached a strength of 700,000. These figures
alone provide a graphic illustration of the escalation
of Japan’s military effort in China. Chiang
Kai-shek did not declare war on the Japanese; nor
did the Tangku truce in May 1933 between the
Nationalist Chinese and the Japanese stop the
Kwantung army. By the end of 1935 large regions
of northern China and Inner Mongolia were
occupied. This brought the Japanese army into
contact with the Soviet Union along hundreds of
miles of new frontier. The Kwantung army
regarded Soviet Russia as the real menace to
Japan’s aspirations in eastern Asia: Russia alone
could put a modern army of millions into the field
of battle on land. The Japanese disregarded the
Chinese as a serious military force. But just
because there were no real obstacles to expansion
in China, it was difficult for the army general staff
to decide where to stop. They argued that the war
in China should be limited so that the army could
concentrate on the Soviet Union. Other officers
wanted first to expand in China. It was the latter
who won out in July 1937 when a clash of local
Chinese and Japanese troops on the Marco Polo
Bridge outside Peking became the Japanese
excuse for launching full-scale war.
Chiang Kai-shek had used the years from 1933 to
1937 to consolidate the power of the Kuomintang
in the rest of China with some success. But the
Western image of republican Chinese democracy
was removed from reality. Chiang’s regime was
totalitarian, with its own gangs and terror police
and an army held together by fear and harsh discipline.
Supported by intellectuals as the only rallying
point for anti-Japanese resistance, and by big
business and the landlords as the bulwark against
communism, Chiang ruled the country through
harshness and corruption. The peasantry were the
principal and most numerous victims. Chiang
prided himself on having copied techniques of
government from Mussolini and Hitler. German
military advisers were attached to his army. He
also cultivated American friendship by his attitude
to business and his welcome to American educators
and missionaries. The achievements of the
Kuomintang in modernising China during a
decade of reforms from 1928 to 1937 also should
not be overlooked. Industry grew, communications
improved, new agricultural techniques raised
produce, education was extended. The cities benefited
the most. Tens of millions of peasants, however,
remained sunk in abject poverty. Further
progress in modernising and unifying China was
terminated by the all-out war launched by Japan in
1937.
The educated elite, in particular, displayed a
sense of national pride in the face of internal conflicts
and foreign aggression. Trade boycotts were
organised against the Japanese and students
demonstrated. Groups argued that the Kuomintang
and the communists should form a new
united front to fight the Japanese. Chiang Kaishek’s
priority, however, was to follow Mao to
the base he had recently set up in Yenan and
smash the ‘bandits’, before turning to meet the
Japanese aggression. He sent Zhang Xueliang,
called the Young Marshal, to Xi’an in the
province of Shensi with the intention that he
should march his troops to Yenan and liquidate
the communist stronghold. What happened then
is one of the most astonishing episodes in the
Chinese war. The Young Marshal installed in
Xi’an with his army had ideas of his own. Mao
skilfully undermined his loyalty to Chiang Kaishek
appealing to him to make common front
against the Japanese. The Young Marshal then
looked for allies and sought the support of the
powerful warlord in the neighbouring Shansi
province; he found him guarded but not unsympathetic.
When in October 1936 Chiang Kai-shek
left Nanking and flew to Xi’an to rally the generals
against the communist ‘traitors’ the response
was lukewarm. So in early December 1936
Chiang Kai-shek returned to Xi’an hoping for
better success.
The Young Marshal now brought matters to a
head. He probably saw himself as replacing
Chiang Kai-shek in a united national movement
against the Japanese who were starting a full-scale
military drive in the north. On 12 December the
Young Marshal’s troops stormed Chiang’s headquarters
just outside Xi’an, killed many of his
bodyguards and took Chiang Kai-shek himself
captive. Two weeks later he was released and
allowed to fly back to Nanking. He owed his
release, and possibly his life, to the intervention
of Mao Zedong. It was an extraordinary turn of
events. Mao had received a telegram from
Moscow conveying Stalin’s advice that Mao
should form a united front with Chiang Kai-shek
against the Japanese. Mao sent Zhou Enlai to
Xi’an to negotiate, to propose that the communists
unite in the fight against the Japanese with
Chiang Kai-shek and to offer to subordinate their
forces. Zhou Enlai also persuaded the Young
Marshal that Chiang Kai-shek was the only possible
leader of a ‘united’ China. A formal communist
offer in February 1937 was not officially
accepted by Chiang Kai-shek, but the military
effort of the Kuomintang did switch to resisting
the Japanese.
As for the Young Marshal, he was arrested and
imprisoned. But the ‘Xi’an incident’ did mark the
beginning of cooperation at least in theory
between the Kuomintang and Mao’s communist
forces. After the Japanese had resumed a full-scale
war in the summer of 1937, the two sides reached
agreement that the 30,000 soldiers of the Chinese
Red Army should become the Eighth Route
Army under nominal Kuomintang control. It was
not a union of spirit, but a tactical move on both
fronts and Mao retained control of the communist
base areas.
Of all the Western powers, Britain had most at
stake in China. Its total trade and commercial
investment in China were very large in 1930, just
exceeding Japan’s. Together, Britain and Japan
dominated all foreign investment in China,
accounting for 72 per cent of the total. The US’s
investment was far behind at 6 per cent, about
the same as France’s. No other power had any
significant investment. The most sensitive point
of Western interests and influence was the great
city of Shanghai. The Western powers and the
Japanese held ‘concessions’ there which virtually
removed the heart of the city and its port from
Chinese control. In January 1932 the Japanese
bombed the Chinese district, army reinforcements
attacked the Chinese parts of Shanghai,
meeting fierce resistance from a Chinese army.
The conflict in China was now brought home
to the ordinary people in the West. For the first
time the cinema newsreels showed the effects of
modern warfare. People were horrified by the sufferings
inflicted on civilian populations and by the
terror bombing from Japanese planes on the
hapless Chinese. This new image of war, which
was to become even more familiar after the outbreak
of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, had a
tremendous impact on public opinion. It produced
contradictory currents. It provoked a revulsion
against war, thus underpinning later attempts
at conciliating Hitler in Europe. The public also
identified with the sufferers and therefore cast
attackers in the role of aggressors to be stopped.
China was seen as the innocent victim. The
Japanese did incalculable harm to their cause by
adopting such a ruthless style of warfare within
the range of Western cameramen.
When the League of Nations met to consider
China’s appeal immediately after the Japanese
launched their operation in Manchuria, public
opinion in the West sided with China. There was
an element of wishful thinking that the League of
Nations would be able to punish the aggressor by
using the machinery of sanctions set up to provide
for collective security. Governments were urged
to support the League. But the League of Nations
could not fulfil such unrealistic expectations. To
oppose Japan by military force on the Chinese
mainland would have required an enormous military
effort. Who would be ready in the midst of
deep depression to raise and supply the large
armies? Alternatively, by a great effort and with
large funds the Chinese armies might be better
equipped and led. Germany was doing all it could
in providing military advice to Chiang Kai-shek’s
forces. The political divisions of China, however,
made it difficult in 1932 and 1933 to conceive of
any effective check on Japan.
The British Foreign Office and the American
State Department had a more realistic appreciation
of the situation. With so much at stake, the British
attitude to Japan was ambiguous. Chinese nationalism
threatened Britain’s imperialist interests as
much as Japan’s. In the US it was clear from the
start that American material interests were not sufficient
to justify the possibility of conflict with
Japan or even a trade embargo, which would have
deeply injured Japan. That remained the view of
official America throughout the 1930s. Yet there
was a genuine sense of outrage that Japan had
offended against the ethical code that should dictate
how it was to conduct its relations with neighbours.
It had broken solemn treaties, and this was
to be condemned. Secretary of State Henry
Stimson issued a famous statement on 7 January
1932 that became known as the Stimson Doctrine
– much to President Hoover’s chagrin since, he
claimed, he had first thought of it. The US, it
declared, would not recognise any treaties or situations
brought about in violation of earlier treaties.
The US thus refused to accept all Japanese
attempts to regularise its control of Manchuria.
The League endorsed this view a little later.
Meanwhile, the League of Nations had sent
Lord Lytton as British chairman of a commission
to investigate on the spot Chinese claims and
Japanese counter-claims. His report in October
1932 condemned the Japanese military action
and suggested a compromise solution that would
have given Manchuria autonomy while preserving
Japanese rights. In February 1933 these recommendations
were accepted by the League
Assembly; the Japanese delegation thereupon left
the League and never returned. The League of
Nations had nothing more to offer in the absence
of will on the part of Britain and the US to back
further action. The League suffered greatly in
prestige. This, in itself, did not bring a general
war between the other powers nearer; indeed, it
might have served a useful purpose if the peoples
in the democratic countries had thereby gained a
greater sense of realism. Too often the call to
‘support the League’ was believed to be all that
was required; it could be comfortably combined
with pacifism and a refusal to ‘fight for king and
country’. Many preferred to believe that they did
not need to shoulder the responsibilities of peacekeeping
or make the sacrifices required to check
aggression – that was the job of the League. An
ardent desire for peace and wishful thinking led
to blame being transferred to the League.
In Japan itself the success of the Kwantung
army and the failure of the League had important
effects too. A wave of patriotism and ultranationalism
swept the population. Japanese
governments now seemed to those Japanese patriots
much too cautious. Patriotic secret societies,
with sometimes only a few hundred members,
sought to influence policy decisively. One method
was to assassinate ministers who, in the societies’
view, did not follow patriotic policies. Frustrated
army officers joined such societies and there were
repeated attempts to stage military coups. Several
prominent ministers were murdered. This reign of
terror did succeed in intimidating many opponents
of extremism. The army meanwhile did not
try to put its own house in order – at least not
until several hundred officers and rebellious
troops in February 1936 had seized the whole
government quarter of Tokyo and assassinated a
number of Cabinet ministers, in the name of the
emperor. The Japanese navy now played a
leading part in putting down the insurrection. But
it proved no victory for moderation. From then
on, civilian ministers came to be even more
dominated by the military. Japan was set on an
expansionist course. Although Britain and the US
did not wish to fight Japan, in the last resort
the issue of peace with the West would depend
on whether Japan’s aims in China were limited
or whether ambition would drive it on to seek to
destroy all Western influence in eastern and
southern Asia.
World History
