A Political and Economic History of China, Part 32: Japan and World War II, Part 1

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6 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs apologizes for his extended under the weather absence but returns with a new article on Japan’s invasion of China during World War II, a conflict estimated to have killed 19 million Chinese.

The Second Sino-Japanese War is a massive story that, even when abridged, will require several articles. In this first installment the Economics Correspondent will lay out the background leading to Japan’s full blown invasion of mainland China in 1937, using some material already covered in previous articles. Next we’ll follow up with a high level overview of the war’s chronology, and lastly with the war’s aftermath for China’s rival Nationalist and Communist parties.

BACKGROUND 

The roots of Japan’s ambitions to colonize China begin in the 19th century.

Before 1839 both China and Japan were largely closed off to the western world. The Chinese Qing Dynasty traded reluctantly with the west and only through a single port—the southern city of Canton (today Guangzhou)—while the Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate traded exclusively with the Dutch and Chinese and also through only one port: Nagasaki.

Both the isolationist Qing and Tokugawa resisted foreign interaction, Japan even beheading shipwrecked sailors the moment they washed ashore, and the western powers countered with varying levels of force. 

The British forced more trading ports and concessions from China by winning the First Opium War of 1839-43. The United States sent Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships” into Tokyo Bay who announced his arrival by loudly firing his cannons into the water (1853).

China and Japan reacted very differently to the west’s more forceful demands.

China’s Qing Dynasty, ruled first by the incompetent and hedonistic Xianfeng emperor (r. 1850-1861) and after him the far more important but ultra-reactionary Empress Dowager Cixi (r. 1861-1908) continued to resist western trade and influence by every means necessary, culminating with the disastrous Boxer Rebellion in 1901. While the western world was undergoing the Second Industrial Revolution, China fell hopelessly behind.

In Japan the 265-year old Tokugawa Shogunate, having no answer to Perry’s cannons, lost face and succumbed to reform-minded officials. The emperor, for centuries merely a figurehead subservient to the shogun, regained power and the shogunate was banned forever.

Japan’s young and renown Meiji Emperor’s calendar years in power (1867-1912) nearly mirrored Cixi’s (1861-1908), but their policies couldn’t have been more different. While Cixi believed China’s cultural superiority could overcome western technology, the reform-minded Meiji recognized Japan had fallen behind and needed to learn all it could from the west. While Cixi resisted western trade, western technology, and western ideas as much as possible, Meiji opened Japan to the world.

Japan went on a crash course signing diplomatic and trade treaties with the western powers while enthusiastically importing western goods, technology, weapons, and advisors at a frenetic pace. Japan sent its officials throughout Europe and the United States to learn as much as possible and the end result was a spectacular ascent nearly unrivaled in history. In one generation an isolated, primitive, agricultural island nation modernized into a major world power.

Unfortunately Japan’s imperial ambitions grew as quickly as its economic and military power. By 1894 it was engaged in its first major regional war: the First Sino-Japanese War which is little known in the west compared to the Second Sino-Japanese War (aka. World War II).

Japan’s smaller navy routed the corrupt Qing Dynasty’s fleet at the battle of the Yalu River while its modern army humiliated Qing forces at several key Chinese ports. In the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki China was forced to cede Korea and Taiwan which Japan colonized for the next fifty years.

Japan then shocked the world by defeating Russia’s navy at the Battle of Tsushima Strait (1905).

Side note: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who planned Pearl Harbor, was a gunnery ensign at Tsushima and lost two fingers in the battle.

By 1905 Japan had wrestled away territory from Russia: more Manchurian ports, control over the South Manchurian Railway, leases over Manchurian territory including the city of Dalian, and half of Sakhalin Island.

And Japan’s Chinese ambitions hardly ended in 1905.

During World War I Japan sided with the Allied Powers and made small contributions (mostly rhetorical) as a tactic to expand its sphere of influence. Japanese representatives at the Treaty of Versailles demanded and were granted formerly German Micronesian islands such as the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls. Japan was also handed China’s previously German-administered Shandong province, but the unexpected public outrage and demonstrations it ignited in China forced the Allies to pressure Japan into returning the territory in 1922.

MANCHURIA

Japanese ambitions for Chinese territory were hardly satisfied after World War I. By the late 1920’s the Japanese government was becoming militarist-fascist and it focused on gaining control of all Manchuria—a frigid, resource-rich territory in China’s northeast roughly the size of France, Germany, and Switzerland combined.

By now China had entered its chaotic “warlord era” and Japan cooperated with Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, the Japanese providing Zhang military and economic support in exchange for permission to make large commercial and strategic investments in the industrial north.

By 1928 the Japanese believed Zhang's son and opium addict, Zhang Xueliang, would be easier to manipulate than his more powerful father, so they assassinated the elder Zhang by blowing up his railcar on a bridge. However the younger Zhang shook off his drug habit and resisted the Japanese who in turn responded with a full invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

The invasion of Manchuria, beginning September 18, 1931, is considered by many historians the true opening salvo of World War II as it preceded Hitler’s invasion of Poland by eight years.

As a pretext for invasion the Japanese army incited the Mukden Incident, a false flag operation whereby the IJA exploded dynamite near a Japanese-owned railroad and then accused Chinese dissidents of carrying out the attack. After five months of fighting Japan had assumed full control of the Manchurian northeast.

Japan had hoped to provoke then-Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek into an all out war, but Chiang understood China’s military was hopelessly behind Japan’s and he used diplomacy and stalling tactics to avoid war. In the ensuing six years Chiang tried to simultaneously crush China’s Communist Party rebellion movement, modernize the Chinese economy and military, and hold off the Japanese.

As Chiang stalled for time, the Japanese worked on consolidating their gains. They set up the puppet state of Manchukuo headed by the former Qing boy-emperor Pu Yi. They also opened the notorious Unit 731—at that time the world’s most advanced biological warfare program—in the northern city of Harbin and tested experimental bacterial agents on eventually tens of thousands of live Chinese (and a few ethnic Russian) subjects throughout the country, a topic the Correspondent will discuss more in a future column.

Then, as a plan to sever more Chinese provinces from the mainland, the Japanese declared three autonomous Chinese regions bordering southern Manchuria. The justification was a claim that the people of these three territories no longer wished to live under Chinese rule and wanted to join Japan. Using this pretext Japan set up puppet administrative councils and demanded Chinese Nationalist (aka. Guomingdang or KMT) officials leave the area.

Chiang Kai-shek, once again not ready to enter into a major war with Japan, didn’t resist. Now the Japanese controlled not only Manchuria but also Chinese territory as far south as Beijing, stretching from Mongolia to the Bohai Sea.

All this time the Chinese public and Chinese communist rebels agitated for the Nationalist government to fight Japanese aggression, but Chiang Kai-shek knew China wasn’t ready and would lose a full scale war. It was only when Chinese dissent reached a head in 1936—when Chiang was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang and forced to agree to unite with the Communists in a united front to resist Japan—that the policy of appeasement ended.

To read more details on Chiang’s kidnapping, the so-called “Xi’an Incident,” go to:

https://www.cautiouseconomics.com/2025/03/china-history31.html

Upon hearing that the Chinese KMT and Communists were no longer fighting one another and had agreed to unite, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) moved up their timetable for their invasion of the Chinese mainland where we’ll resume in the next article.