American History: A Survey (Brinkley), 13th Edition

Chapter 25: THE GLOBAL CRISIS

America in the World

The Sino-Japanese War, 1931–1941

Long before Pearl Harbor, well before war broke out in Europe in 1939, the first shots of what would become World War II had been fired in the Pacific in a conflict between Japan and China.

Having lived in almost complete isolation from the world until the nineteenth century, Japan emerged from World War I as a great world power, with a proud and powerful military and growing global trade. But the Great Depression created severe economic problems for the Japanese (in part because of stiff new American tariffs on silk imports); and as in other parts of the world, the crisis strengthened the political influence of highly nationalistic and militaristic leaders. Out of the Japanese military emerged dreams of a new empire in the Pacific. Such an empire would, its proponents believed, give the nation access to fuel, raw materials, and markets for its industries, as well as land for its agricultural needs and its rapidly increasing population. Such an empire, they argued, would free Asia from exploitation by Europe and America and would create a "new world order based on moral principles."

During World War I, Japan had seized territory and economic concessions in China and had created a particularly strong presence in the northern Chinese region of Manchuria. There, in September 1931, a group of militant young army officers seized on a railway explosion to justify a military campaign through which they conquered the entire province. Both the United States government and the League of Nations demanded that Japan evacuate Manchuria. The Japanese ignored them, and for the next six years consolidated their control over their new territory.

On July 7, 1937, Japan began a wider war when it attacked Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing. Over the next few weeks, Japanese forces overran a large part of southern China, including most of the port cities, killing many Chinese soldiers and civilians in the process. Particularly notorious was the Japanese annihilation of many thousands of civilians in the city of Nanjing (the number has long been in dispute, but estimates range from 80,000 to more than 300,000) in an event that became known in China and the West as the Nanjing Massacre. The Chinese government fled to the mountains. As in 1931, the United States and the League of Nations protested in vain.

The China that the Japanese had invaded was a nation in turmoil. It was engaged in a civil war of its own— between the so-called Kuomintang, a nationalist party led by Chiang Kaishek, and the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong; and this internal struggle weakened China's capacity to resist invasion. But beginning in 1937, the two Chinese rivals agreed to an uneasy truce and began fighting the Japanese together, with some success— bogging the Japanese military down in a seemingly endless war and imposing hardships on the Japanese people at home. The Japanese government and the military, however, remained determined to continue the war against China, whatever the sacrifices.

One result of the costs of the war in China was a growing Japanese dependence on the United States for steel and oil to meet civilian and military needs. In July 1941, in an effort to pressure the Japanese to stop their expansion, the Roosevelt administration made it impossible for the Japanese to continue buying American oil. Japan now faced a choice between ending its war in China or finding other sources of fuel to keep its war effort (and its civilian economy) going. It chose to extend the war beyond China in a search for oil. The best available sources were in the Dutch East Indies; but the only way to secure that European colony, the Japanese believed, would be to neutralize the increasingly hostile United States in Asia. Visionary military planners in Japan began advocating a daring move to immobilize the Americans in the Pacific before expanding the war elsewhere—with an attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The first blow of World War II in America, therefore, was the culmination of more than a decade of Japanese efforts to conquer China.

http://www.wfu.edu/academics/history/StudentWork/AsiaPacificWar/asia-pacific-mike/asia-pacific/background4.htm - The Mukden Incident

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_War _(1937-1945) - The Sino-Japanese War

1
While many historians date the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War to the Battle of Marco Polo Bridge in 1937, some Chinese scholars date the beginning of the war to the "Mukden Incident" of September 1931. What is this incident, what precipitated it, and how did it signify the larger war to come? Do you believe this is a valid starting point for World War II? Why or why not?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_War _(1937-1945) - Wikipedia: Sino-Japanese War

2
In many history textbooks, the tale of World War II begins with Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. Do you agree with this dating system? Was the Sino-Japanese War a part of a WWII, or a prelude to it? How did the events of the Sino-Japanese War augur the Japanese sneak attack on WWII, if at all?
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