132 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
- Britain, France, Italy, and in particular the United States – all of which maintained
extraterritoriality and had great economic stakes in the city. This incident thus pro-
vided an impetus to the eventual rapprochement between Moscow and Washington.²⁰
Japan’s further expansion in China only aggravated the matter. In January 1933, to
secure the southern borders of the newly created states, Japanese/Manchu forces in-
vaded Rehe (Jehol) Province and eventually subdued it. The conquest resulted in the
Tanggu Truce, a de facto recognition of Manchukuo by the Chinese Kuomintang gov-
ernment. This Japanese/Manchukuo military advance led one witness to later observe:
In 1933 I went up to the province of Jehol as guide, interpreter, and ghostwriter to an Englishman
who was reporting for an American news syndicate, and together with an American reporter and
a couple of American military observers watched the Japanese overrun 100,000 square miles of
territory in ten days. They did it by the use of motorized transport and by cutting through the
Chinese forces and driving deep, paying no attention to their exposed anks. This Japanese cam-
paign in 1933 and not the German campaign in Poland in 1939, was the rst tryout of the modern
blitzkrieg. Only the Germans and the Russians seemed to have paid much attention. Other peo-
ple thought it was just a lot of Japanese overrunning a lot of Chinese, and not worth study by
professional soldiers.²¹In response, Stalin made full use of the Marxist understanding of “contradictions
between imperial powers,” to pit Japan and the United States against each other.
Most signi cantly, he sought diplomatic relations with the United States. Until then
Washington obstinately refused to recognize the atheist Marxist state, but alarmed
by Japan’s expansion into China, President Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly began ex-
ploring a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, a move Stalin happily welcomed.
Negotiations were conducted behind the scenes, the secrecy being necessary given
the anticipated negative public reaction to a US recognition of the atheist state.²²
Roosevelt planned his move carefully so that the United States’ recognition would
not expose the Soviet Union to Japanese threat. Fearing that Japan, reacting violently
to the US-Soviet rapprochement, might attack the Port of Vladivostok, Roosevelt went
out of his way to protect the Communist state by waiting for the port to freeze before an-
nouncing the recognition, since it would be di cult for Japanese battleships to strike
20 For the importance of the Shanghai Incident, see Tetsuya Sakai, “Nihon gaik ̄o ni okeru soren kan
no hensen (1923–37).”Kokka Gakkai zassi97, nos. 3–4 (1983), 307–308.
21 Quoted in Robert P. Newman,Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China(University of California Press,
1992), 21. See also Owen Lattimore,Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and
Russia(Boston: Little Brown, 1950), 211.
22 On the United States, see Beatrice Farnsworth,William C. Bullitt and the Soviet Union(Indiana
University Press, 1967), ch. 5, and on the Soviet Union, see Stalin’s coded telegram on Litvinov’s visit
to the United States, RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 82, l. 43 and the Politburo directive to Maksim Litvinov
(25 October 1933), f. 17, op. 162, d. 15, l. 119.