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 hemi-
sphere – 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 – tri-
umphed 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 out-
posts 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 ambi-
guities 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 par-
ticipate 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, con-
centrated in Shanghai, was less than American
investment in Japan. The Japanese had also
acquired rights and privileges, especially in south-
ern 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 pos-
sessions 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 manip-
ulating 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 contem-
plated 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 funda-
mental issues were at stake. These were based on
American ideological assumptions which were
neither shared nor understood in Japan. The fas-
cinating 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
1
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