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 inde-
pendent roots.
Seen through Japanese and Chinese eyes
Western policies appeared to change with confus-
ing rapidity in the first three decades of the twen-
tieth century. Conscious of their military and
industrial weakness in comparison with the West,
the Chinese and Japanese accordingly had to cal-
culate how best to adapt to constantly shifting
external conditions. Critical, too, was the ques-
tion of what their relationship to each other
should be. All these problems arising from ‘mod-
ernisation’ and changing external and internal
Asian relationships were to reach explosive inten-
sity 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 ‘govern-
ment’ 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 toChapter 18
THE MOUNTING CONFLICT IN EASTERN
ASIA, 1928–37