The Sino-Japanese War

On 7 July 1937, less than a month after Konoe took office, an incident took place at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing. There is no evidence in this case to suggest that the incident was staged or deliberately provoked by the local Japanese forces.

was greatest and where Jiang's German-trained army divisions were stationed. Thus, by mid-August, a Sino-Japanese war was well under way.

The Japanese believed that they could inflict a rapid defeat upon China, which would pave the way for a negotiated solution of the problems in Sino-Japanese relations and a return to the construction of a defence state at home. In order to bring about a swift conclusion to the conflict, the Japanese pursued peace talks while fighting continued around Shanghai. However, although the Chinese suffered a series of setbacks, such as the fall of Shanghai in November and of Nanjing in December, they refused to make peace on Japan's terms. The problem for Japan was that Jiang was not in a mood or position to compromise. On 21 August 1937 a Sino-Soviet non-aggression pact was signed which led the Russians to start a policy of large-scale military aid and assistance to China in the hope that its resistance would prevent any Japanese offensive against Siberia.

see Chapter 7

In addition, moves within the Western democracies encouraged Jiang's resistance. The revival of Japanese aggression led to a wave of sympathy for China in the West, particularly after newspapers and newsreels carried stories of the Japanese bombing of civilians in Shanghai, Nanjing and Guangzhou. The result was that in both government and public circles there was talk of unleashing economic sanctions against Japan. On 5 October Roosevelt made his ‘quarantine' speech, in which he hinted at the need for a naval blockade of Japan, and a day later the League of Nations called for a conference of the signatories of the Nine- Power Treaty to be convened in Brussels. In the short term, this anti-Japanese sentiment led to nothing substantial, for Britain was too preoccupied by events in Europe to send its fleet to East Asia, while Roosevelt remained hemmed in by isolationist opinion. Even Japanese attacks on both American and British gun­boats on the Yangtze in December 1937 only led to a brief call for united action before the moment passed. However, the Western democracies did take some measures to bolster China's resistance. In February 1938, for example, the British agreed to the construction of a road linking Yunnan province to Burma, while the Americans in the summer introduced a ‘moral embargo' on aircraft exports to Japan.

Such moves encouraged Jiang in his belief that there must be a limit to the West's patience, and thus he remained impervious to Japan's calls on him to surrender.

Even after a year of war, however, Japan found itself as far from victory as ever. To a considerable extent it blamed this on Western support for China. From the autumn of 1938 it therefore sought to isolate China from the West. One of the major planks of Japanese policy was to appeal to China by emphasizing, as it had done before in the Amau statement, that it sought no more than to bring about co-operation between and prosperity for the peoples of East Asia. Accordingly, in the ‘New Order in East Asia' statement of 3 November 1938, Konoe called for a union between Japan, Manchukuo and China. These pan-Asian sentiments were, however, too far from the reality of Japanese practice to persuade many Chinese. By this stage in the war Japan had engaged in a number of atrocities against Chinese civilians, such as the Nanjing massacre in December 1937, which made its words about brotherly co-operation sound decidedly unconvincing. Still, the ‘New Order' did lead to the defection of one leading GMD figure, Wang Jingwei, from Jiang's camp and after much delay he established a puppet regime in Nanjing in April 1940.

In addition, Japan sought to apply pressure on the Western Powers. Within China it began a policy of harassment towards their territorial concessions, particularly at Tianjin in north China, in order to try to force them to become more strictly neutral. In addition to this, in the autumn/winter of 1938—39 it expanded its influence over south China and the South China Sea, thus beginning to encroach on the European possessions in South-East Asia. Another weapon in the Japanese arsenal was to strengthen its ties with the Axis Powers in Europe.

Japan's prevarication was the result of a key weakness in its position, which was that, although it greatly resented the West's attitude, it still needed to trade with the democracies. In particular, Japan depended for most of its raw materials, such as oil, rubber, wool and tin, on the United States and the British Empire, and this reliance had grown rapidly as a result of the economic demands of the war with China. To come out in open opposition to them thus raised the danger that Japan might become the victim of economic sanctions. The precariousness of its position was underlined in July 1939, when the Roosevelt administration, in the light of domestic pressures and the recent Japanese confrontation with Britain over Tianjin, announced the abrogation of its commercial treaty with Japan. Japan's difficulties became even greater with the start of the European war, for the British and French empires now became war economies which limited Japan's ability to

Axis

A term coined originally by Mussolini in November 1936 to describe the relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The German-Italian Axis was reinforced by the so-called Pact of Steel signed by Rome and Berlin in May 1939. More broadly speaking, the term is often used (as in Chapter 8 of this book) to refer to the relationship between Germany, Italy and Japan. These three Powers were formally linked by the German-Japanese Anti­Comintern Pact of November 1936, which Italy signed one year later, and the Tripartite Pact of September 1940.

acquire raw materials from these sources. Thus, despite its efforts to use coercion to bring about the end of Western support for China, Japan found itself no nearer a successful conclusion to the war and faced new threats to the economic foundations of its war effort.