S16: Sino‑Japanese War

“Chee Lai!” (“March of the Volunteers”)

Lyrics by Tian Han, 1934 Music by Nie Er, 1935 Sung by Paul Robeson

Dominant questions of the day:

• What are the social, political, and economic conditions behind the “backward” behavior and worldview of the Chinese peasant?
• How to change these conditions?

Donggu Base Area - Established in Sep 1927 in Western Jiangxi - Led by locals: Lai Jingbang and Li Wenlin - Majority Hakka migrants during late Ming and early Qing - Instead of land reform, reliance on peasant associations and building local economy - Alliance with local bandits and secret societies

Jinggangshan Base Area

• Established in fall 1928 in border region between Hunan and Jiangxi
• Ethnically mixed between Han and Hakka settlers
• Developed on the basis of military control imposed from the outside: Mao Zedong and Zhu De
• Land reform: All land confiscated and redistributed per capita
• Base area abandoned in Jan 1929

We want to stir up aspiration, place economics in this kind of human life, allow human life to drive economics, control economics, enjoy the use of economics, not to cause economics to control human life.

• Missionary school in Sichuan, followed by education in Hong Kong and US (Yale 1918)
• Volunteer in France during WWI, followed by graduate studies at Harvard
• Founder of National Association of Mass Education Movement (MEM) in 1923

• Early survey of Beijing with Chinese students from the American–funded Yenching University
• Social science in service of modernization and enlightenment

• MEM experiment in Ding County, Hebei
• Led by Liang Shuming and James Yen
• Four weaknesses of China: poverty, ignorance, disease, and misgovernment

• Ignorance: Village schools and cultural programs
• Poverty: Farmers’ coop, improved techniques, seeds, and technologies
• Health: Triage system with clinics
• Politics: Hebei Institute for Political and Social Reconstruction (IPSR) in charge of county governance (taxation, land ownership, etc)

• Emphasis on self-sustenance, but relied on volunteers and funding from Rockefeller Foundation
• Ended by Japanese invasion in 1937

• Urban vs. rural dichotonomy: Not a reality, but a construction
• Ideological simplifications: Modernization, Marxism
• Regional variation and diversity: Size and scale of China defy simple generalization

• Incubator of a broad range of political views: from Marxism to modernization theory
• New academic methods (surveys, interviews, etc.) from sociology, anthropology, and economics
• China as social laboratory for modernization: How to use social science to engineer new citizens and social conditions?

• Road to the war: National war, civil war, global war?
• How did the war change China and the world?
• Why are memories of WWII still so difficult?

• Second Sino-Japanese War
• Eight Years’ War of Resistance
• Pacific War
• World War II

• 1928-06-04: Assassination of Zhang Zuolin, warlord of Manchuria
• 1931-09-18: Mukden Incident
• 1932-01-28: Shanghai Incident
• 1932-02-16: Founding of Manchukuo
• 1937-07-07: Marco Polo Bridge Incident

• Migration ban relaxed by 1902
• Response to Russian and Japanese expansion in the region, and to famine in north China
• 8 million migrants between 1890 and 1942

• If colonizing Korea was seen as critical step to securing Japan, Manchuria’s strategic location was critical to secure Korea.
• Korea as the key objective and the real prize of the Russo-Japanese War
• 1905: South Manchurian sphere of influence after victory in Russo-Japanese War

• Leasehold over Liaodong Peninsula (later Kwantung Leased Territory)
• Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway from Changchun to Liishun (later Mantetsu, the South Manchurian Railway)
• Railway zone, which land along railway track and key railway towns

• Regular army division and heavy siege artillery battalion in the Kwantung Leased Territory
• Two-fold strategic mission:
  • Secure concessions to build new strategic rail lines
  • ensure that Manchuria remained free of the political and military instability in ROC

• Japan’s largest corporation
• Expanded Russian-built railway into largest rail network in Asia
• Operated coal mines, harbor and port facilities
• Subsidiary corporations: millet, sorghum, coal, soybeans
• Research wing became center of Japanese colonial research

• Kwantung Army and South Manchurian Railroad as main employers of empire
• Japanese civilian population in Manchuria: from 16,612 in 1906 to 233,749 in 1930
• Most managerial, urban, and professional: manufacturing, commerce, transportation, public service as key industries

• Japan backed Manchurian Zhang Zuolin
• Zhang Zuolin was targeted by the Northern Expedition
• In 1928, Kwantung army acted without Japanese gov consent and killed Zhang to prevent Chiang Kai-shek influence in Manchuria

• Emperor Hirohito ordered PM Tanaka Giichi to discipline the army
• Tanaka, ineffective, resigned
• Too powerful to fail: By 1929, the army could act independently of the gov without fear of consequence

• Great Depression further weakened Japanese gov
• Next PM Hamaguchi Yuko could not solve the Great Depression and was shot by right-wing radical in Nov 1930
• US tariffs increased duties on Japanese goods led to failures of silk industry and rapid unemployment
• Full control over Manchuria predicted to be a Japanese “lifeline” and “our only means of survival”

• Security: Buffer to Russia
• Source of raw materials: Coal, iron, timber, soybeans
• Markets to help withstand impact of global depression
• Four times larger than Japan: Living space for Japan’s population

• Staged explosion of Mantetsu track near the Chinese military base in Fengtian (now Shenyang)
• Japan used the alleged attack as a pretext to open fire on the Chinese garrison.
• Between September 18, 1931, and the Tanggu Truce of May 31 , 1933: four provinces of Jilin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Rehe brought under Japanese military control.

• Ideological divergence between nationalism and imperialism after WWI: Influence of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Promise of “self-determination”
• Leaving or leading Asia: Should Japan become a Western nation, or should it, as the most developed nation in the East, lead Asian nations to counter Western imperialism?
• “Same script, same race” argument as basis for equality and unity

• Manchuria as the means to rejuvenate domestic economy
• Self-sufficient trade zone protected from the uncertainties of the global marketplace
• Between 1932 and 1941: 5.86 billion yen were injected into Manchukuo – more than investments in the entire overseas empire, China, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Karafuto, and Nan’ya by 1930

• Manchukuo as a laboratory for testing economic theories
• New breed of planners: experts in developing industrial policies
• Two novel ideas of economic governance in the industrialized world:
• State-managed economic development, borrowed from the Soviet model for the command economy.
• Self-sufficient production sphere, or bloc economy, drew on economic analyses of military production in World War I.

• By 1932, Manchuria was wholly occupied by the Japanese
• Not formal annexation of the Northeast and creation of a Japanese colony
• Instead, creation of Manchukuo an independent state in March 1932, under Puyi, last emperor of Qing dynasty

How could China, a poor and underdeveloped country, defend itself from one of the most militarized and technologically sophisticated countries in the world?

• Chiang Kai-shek: “First internal pacification, then external resistance”
• Logic: Building up China’s strength while hoping for int’l assistance
• Criticized for putting party interests ahead of nation’s

• Mutiny of Zhang Xueliang in Dec 1936
• Chiang Kai-shek held hostage for two weeks

• Led to the second United Front between Nationalists and Communists
• Mobilizing all of China’s military forces to repel Japanese advance
• However, underlying tensions between the Nationalists and Communists remained.
• The truce was more of a pause than a reconciliation, with both sides consolidating power for future conflicts.

• Marked Soviet Union’s rising power and clout in China: Stalin
• Nationalism as potent force for political mobilization
• Zhang Xueliang arrested and under arrest until 1991

• Battle for North China: Beijing and Tianjin (1937)
• Battle of Shanghai (1937)
• Nanjing Massacre (Dec 1937 - Jan 1938)
• Battle of Wuhan (1938)