Free China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice by Richard Bernstein Page B

preparing to move on to the audacious, racially tinged goal of replacing white European colonialism in all of Asia, creating a vast new sphere to be led by Japan. It made modest progress toward this goal after World War I when, as a reward for having aligned itself with the winning side, it was granted the former German possessions in Shandong province in China, including the coastal city ofQingdao, known in the West for the eponymous brewery that the Germans had built there. Japan gave those possessions back to China in the 1920s as the world collectively began to feel some remorse for its violations of China’s sovereignty, and Japan, more moderate and accommodating than it later became, felt the need to make a conciliatory gesture.
    But then Japan’s moderates lost control of the situation to its extreme nationalists and militants bent on realizing the country’s pan-Asian destiny, which, they believed, would require an apocalyptic final showdown with western civilization. To dominate Asia, they first had to dominate China, which they despised as flabby, corrupt, and inferior, and to dominate China, they needed to retain control of Manchuria and to build it into a base for expansion.
    In 1931 and 1932, the militarists, supported by Emperor Hirohito, gained complete control. Nationalist groups with names like the CherryBlossom Society and the Blood Brotherhood League committed a series of domestic assassinations. One victim was the last prime minister who attempted to curb the army’s ambitions on the Asian mainland, which wiped out any vestiges of moderation. In 1931, in what came to be called theMukden Incident, the members of theKwantung Army, which was the epicenter of armed Japanese nationalism, blew up some railroad tracks on the Southern Manchurian Railway near Mukden, blamed the Chinese for the sabotage, and then used the incident to seize control of all the northeastern Chinese provinces that made up Manchuria. A few months later, they persuaded the last emperor of the overthrown Qing dynasty,Henry Pu-yi, to become the puppet leader of a new, supposedly independent country called Manchukuo.Early in 1932, an angry Chinese crowd beat up five Japanese Buddhist monks in Shanghai—or, as some accounts had it, Japanese officers bribed Chinese thugs to assault the priests. In response, the Japanese sent troops into the Chinese section of the city (the international settlements where most Japanese citizens lived was always off-limits to warfare in Shanghai). When units of the Chinese army, advised by their German trainers, effectively resisted, Japan sent an enormous land and naval invasion force to Shanghai and used both gunboats and biplanes to bomb heavily populated Chinese residential areas, the first such bombing of an urban center in history though it was soon to be followed by many more in both Asia and Europe. The long-term, remorseless, and atrocity-laden effort to conquer all of China had begun.
    These aggressions aroused futile protests in the League of Nations. The creation of Manchukuo was deemed to be illegitimate, but no practical steps were taken to punish Japanese aggression. More important, though Chiang Kai-shek’s government sent troops in an unsuccessful effort to resist the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1932, it acquiesced to Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. It was in the midst of its nationalist revolution, striving to forge a “new China,” modern, strong, self-reliant, and free of foreign infringements on its sovereignty, and Chiang, the leader of this revolution, understood that the country was militarily feeble and unable to thwart Japanese ambitions. The slogan, before Chiang was kidnapped in Xian and forced to abandon it, was “internal pacification before external resistance.”
    But Japan’s manufacture of “incidents” continued, and each of them was used as a pretext for further encroachments. Beginning on July 7, 1937, when a Chinese patrol killed a Japanese soldier on