Manchuria

On the night of September 18, 1931, an explosion orchestrated by Japanese saboteurs destroyed a segment of track on the Japanese-controlled South Manchuria Railway near Mukden Station in the northern Chinese province of Manchuria. In the ensuing chaos, the Kwantung Army, the Japanese force that had occupied the area since 1905, advanced through the rest of the province, beginning the attempted Japanese conquest of Asia that would eventually culminate in the World War II Pacific theater. As with the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the failure of the United States to cooperate with the League of Nations in a firm effort to quell aggression reflected the American policy of noninterventionism produced by the adverse reaction to World War I and by the focus on domestic problems arising from the Great Depression.

Despite pleas for stronger action from his Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, President Herbert C. Hoover expressed only moral disapproval of the Japanese actions. The United States adopted a policy of “nonrecognition,” meaning that it would not recognize as legal any action that violated the administrative and territorial integrity of China or threatened the American commercial interests within China guaranteed by the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900 and the 1922 Nine-Power Treaty. The League of Nations, unable to pursue stronger action without American support, essentially adopted this same policy of nonrecognition, popularly known as the Stimson Doctrine. Not surprisingly, such a weak reaction encouraged the Japanese to pursue their expansionist agenda even more vigorously. In early 1932, Manchuria was converted into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, and in 1933 Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. The defeat of the Hoover presidency in 1932 raised fears among American isolationists of a shift in policy towards Japan, but the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his secretary of state Cordell Hull, continued to follow the Stimson Doctrine.

Throughout the 1930s, the Japanese grew increasingly more aggressive in East Asia and in asserting their military and diplomatic equality with the Western powers. Attempts to renew the naval limitation agreements signed at the 1930 London Naval Conference failed in 1935 as the Japanese demanded arms parity in all categories of ships, a concession that neither the United States nor Great Britain was willing to make. In November 1936, Japan allied with Germany in the Anti-Comintern Pact. Despite evidence of increasing levels of Japanese militarism, the American government was caught by surprise when the Japanese conquest of Manchuria escalated into full-scale war with China in July of 1937. Roosevelt responded by refusing to intervene unless American citizens and property in China were threatened. This policy was tested when Japanese pilots sank the American gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River on December 12, 1937, killing two Americans in what seemed plainly a deliberate action. Public outcry about the incident within the United States was minimal, however; and after the Japanese government quickly offered apologies and indemnities, the episode blew over with no American retaliation or change in policy.

Tensions between the United States and Japan escalated as the Roosevelt administration began to move by the end of the decade toward more interventionist policies to stop German and Japanese aggression, including Japanese expansion in Manchuria. Negotiations in the autumn of 1941 offered a final opportunity to forestall hostilities between Japan and the United States. The Japanese requested the lifting of sanctions on materials such as iron ore, aviation gasoline, and scrap iron that Roosevelt had begun to impose the previous year, and demanded American acquiescence to their expansionism in East Asia. Roosevelt and Hull, believing that the conquest of Manchuria and war with China were part of larger Japanese designs on the rest of Asia, refused these terms and demanded that the Japanese withdraw from China and drop their expansionist campaign. On October 16, 1941, Japan’s civilian government, led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye, fell and was succeeded by a militarist government led by General Hideki Tojo. While the civilian government had hoped to obtain international compliance with their expansionist aims through diplomacy, the militarists believed that this could only be achieved by force. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came on December 7, 1941.

While the Chinese regained direct control of Manchuria after World War II under terms established at the 1943 Cairo Conference, the province continued to fall under foreign influence. In the wake of the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Soviet Union successfully demanded that several possessions in northern China lost by the Russians at the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, including the South Manchuria Railway, should revert back to Russian control. After being liberated from the Japanese empire, Manchuria would quickly fall under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union in the early years of the cold war.

See also foreign policy.

Further reading: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Armin Rappaport, Henry L. Stimson and Japan, 1931-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

—Mary E. Carroll-Mason