Wars produce sudden and irrevocable changes. Although they are fought for reasons, they can stampede passions, and mass passions give no quarter to reason, let alone to any individuals barring the way. Millions of lives lost mean millions of roads not taken, altering the roster of the born and unborn, and producing decisions informed by the road taken. The passions elicited by the killing, the dying, and the witnessing put a period on the way the world was. The combustion of reason and passion leaves transformative and often unintended outcomes, which in the long term may prove more important than the war’s original purpose. Given the costs, unpredictability, and irretrievability, wars are important to understand.

We in the West treat World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War as distinct events, and in doing so we misunderstand each one. The conventional tale of World War II divides into two fronts, a European theater, opening in 1939, and a Pacific theater, opening in 1941, and the tale ends in 1945 with the fall of Berlin in May and with atomic bombs on Japan in August. Yet Japan’s war began a decade prior in 1931, and that war precipitated its attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew the United States into World War II, and thus precluded a Japanese victory in China. The conventional tale does little to explain Japan’s curious behavior. An attack on one’s most important trading partner and source of the war matériel necessary to continue the fight in China would seem remarkably counterproductive.

Historical convention in both East and West dates the Second Sino-Japanese War as beginning in 1937. From the Chinese Communist Party point of view, this dating emphasizes that the Nationalist armed resistance to Japan began only in 1937 – contemptibly late in the game. From the Nationalist Party point of view, the dating emphasizes the Japanese campaign to occupy its capital and the bitter fighting between its conventional forces against those of Japan. From the Japanese point of view, the conventional dating implies that Manchuria was not a part of China, and therefore the hostilities emanating from Manchuria were separate from the war between Japan and China, so Japan was not so bad after all because Manchuria was up for grabs. Yet both the Nationalists and Communists agree that Manchuria was and is an integral part of China, and, since World War II, Japan has also recognized this fact. If so, then basic logic reveals a war that began in 1931, not 1937.

In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and fought against local resistance that it did not largely suppress until 1933. While Japanese and Chinese historians referred to these events as the Manchurian Incident, the facts on the ground fit the narrowest definition of a war even if the parties involved were too polite to call it such. Although Nationalist troops did none of the fighting, other Chinese did, mainly Manchurians, most of whom were ethnic Han Chinese, not Manchus. The occupation of Manchuria did not sate the Japanese, who continued to expand their zone of occupation in North China from 1933 to 1936, what I impoliticly call the North China Campaign. Again, although the Nationalist armies did not fight the Japanese, North Chinese did. So again even under the narrowest definition of warfare, war continued between Japanese main forces and Chinese insurgents from 1933 and 1935, and the battlefield was located on Chinese territory.

Since the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese army war plans had focused on defeating Russia in an anticipated war to end all wars for Siberia east of Lake Baikal. Army warnings about the Russian threat assumed a shrill tone after the Russian Revolution when the simple problem of Russian imperialism acquired an ideological dimension with the admixture of communism. These fears then became chronic with the post–World War I economic depression in Japan followed by the global Great Depression, which together made communism increasingly attractive to Japanese labor leaders and rank and file.

Russian revolutionaries deployed cadres around the globe to spread communism and made clear their goal not only to overturn the global order, but also to overturn the domestic orders within each country with social revolutions for all. Political and economic elites knew what to expect on the basis of the Russian Revolution – a classwide death sentence. Previously, the Russian threat to Japan had been strictly external in terms of territorial expansion abroad, but with the spread of communism, it became a domestic threat that sounded internal alarm bells throughout the Japanese government, and most particularly at army headquarters.

Until World War II, the United States remained a bit player in Asia, where the European powers had apportioned themselves spacious colonies and spheres of influence. The United States had arrived late on the colonial scene with the Spanish-American War of 1898, which netted it Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, and, the month the war ended, it annexed Hawaii. The following year, the United States, now a rising power with great power aspirations, made a major foreign policy pronouncement, the Open Door Policy, which strongly suggested that all powers should respect China’s territorial integrity and not attempt to carve out exclusive zones. The other powers had reacted to Chinese political and military incompetence in the First Sino-Japanese War with a postwar feeding frenzy, the so-called scramble for concessions, when they had vivisected China into a welter of exclusive spheres of interest. Americans, as usual, wanted markets open to trade, and exclusive zones threatened this plan. Americans also believed that exclusive zones threatened Chinese interests.

For better or for worse, the ideas of free trade and free access underlying the Open Door Policy have remained consistent themes in American foreign policy ever since. The policy contained an assumption, which Americans did not consider necessary to state because they assumed it to be obvious to all. This was freedom of the high seas, which were assumed to be a commons for all to use up to a few miles from the shore. These two principles, free trade and freedom of navigation, underlie the outlook of a maritime power, but not necessarily of a continental power, which may consider seas as territory to be claimed, divided, and closed off. The Western order of global trade, however, depends on freedom of the seas. The whole edifice crashes down without it.

Understanding the magnitude of Chiang Kai-shek’s accomplishment with the Northern Expedition’s reunification of China and the magnitude of the task still lying ahead at the time of the Xi’an Incident requires a retrospective on China’s long civil war of the twentieth century that lasted from 1911 to 1949. This was a dreaded interregnum period between the Qing dynasty and its successor system of government. In Chinese history, periods of dynastic change, when central authority collapses and war ravages the land until the restoration of authority, typically last decades and are characterized by chaos, or 亂 (luan) in Chinese. The word resonates with evil foreboding.

In 1936, the chaos had been escalating for a century. Like the Japanese euphemism of “incidents” for wars, the Chinese apply the misnomer of “rebellions” to their civil wars. In the nineteenth century, China faced numerous and overlapping civil wars – the Taiping, Nian, and Donggan Rebellions – to name just the largest. These three alone may have taken up to 50 million lives. To put the figure in perspective, more than 57 million people died in World War II. These rebellions devastated virtually every province of China. The peak period lasted more than twenty years in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. China also simultaneously fought and lost a succession of regional wars against the colonial powers: the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60), the Sino-French War (1883–5), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), and the Boxer Uprising (1899–1901). The Boxer “Uprising,” another misnomer, was a civil war overlaid by a multinational invasion by all the great powers plus some.

The global war brought an end to the regional war, but not before the Second Sino-Japanese War had altered the balance in the long Chinese civil war. The long regional war destroyed not only the Nationalist army, but, more importantly, the sociopolitical fabric of Chinese society, which previously had prevented Communist expansion in rural areas. Japanese actions uprooted communities, turned peasants into refugees, and left a political vacuum, which it lacked the capacity to fill. The vacuum created an opportunity, which the Communists recognized and seized. The Japanese military strategy of relentless expansion and brutality catalyzed a countervailing Chinese nationalism. This viscerally anti-Japanese nationalism increasingly united a chronically divided peasantry, the often forgotten force in Chinese politics, whose influence becomes decisive in periods of dynastic change. As General Peng Dehuai told Edgar Snow in 1936, the peasantry required only leadership.

While the Communists recognized and filled the leadership vacuum in rural China, the Nationalists fixated on the illusive pursuit of operational victory that had also consumed the Japanese. Like the Japanese the Nationalists tried to kill their way to power without adequate attention to the sources of allegiance. Japanese military strategy created a nationalistic community increasingly loyal to the Chinese Communist Party as the only political force offering any hope for rural China, where the vast majority of Chinese conscripts lived. In rural and urban areas, the Communists relied on the youth – a neglected group in Confucianism, where youth deferred to age. They harnessed the idealism of the young with a promise of leadership in the vanguard of New China.

In Chinese history, devastating chaos characterized periods between dynasties. Prosperity resulted from unity and stable rule, while dynastic change heralded warfare on an empirewide scale, ruining provinces for decades. The Chinese have portrayed their history in terms of a dynastic cycle, consisting of the rise, the maturation, and the decline of a ruling house, followed by a chaotic interregnum before the rise of a successor dynasty. This analytical framework followed Buddhist beliefs about the birth, maturation, decay, and death of all living things, and the rebirth of life each spring after the dead of winter. According to this framework, dynasties on the rise or at their peak held the mandate of heaven, the cosmic legitimacy to rule. Those that lost their mandate could expect imminent overthrow. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, China faced a long and bloody interregnum that lasted until the Communists finally reunified much of the Qing empire in 1949.

Just as Japanese leaders faced terrible dilemmas in 1930s – to work within the gridlocked international order or to take decisive action – Chinese leaders faced lethal choices. Although there was a growing consensus that Confucianism could no longer serve as the unalterable philosophical bedrock of China, there was great discord over its replacement. Everyone wanted a New China, but what sort of institutions should it have? China’s ethnic minorities saw an opportunity to slip the Han-Chinese imperial leash. Tibet broke away after 1912 and remained independent until the People’s Liberation Army rolled in two generation later in 1951. Outer Mongolia broke away with Russian help to become the People’s Republic of Mongolia in 1924. The Muslims of Xinjiang also attempted to leave. Certain regional warlords simply wanted home rule, such as the opium-financed Yan Xishan, long the ruler of Shanxi, or the opium-financed Long Yun of the Lolo minority, long the ruler of Yunnan. Others had national ambitions such as Li Zongren of the Guangxi group in the South, the Zhang clan of Manchuria, and Feng Yuxiang, the Christian warlord of North China. The latter type desired to reunify China under their personal hegemony and so constituted alternatives to Chiang Kai-shek’s government.

Japan, the United States, and Russia all intervened in the long Chinese civil war but noneachieved their desired long-term goals. Japan sought a productive extension of its empire. TheUnited States envisioned a unified, democratic, and capitalistic China. Russia planned for adependent and dependable client state. Instead, Japanese military strategy produced the very outcomeit was designed to prevent. By destroying the Nationalists’ conventional forces while theChinese Communists cultivated rural support behind Japanese lines, the strategy positioned theCommunists to win the final chapter of the long Chinese civil war to produce a unified, Communist,and viscerally anti-Japanese China. U.S. diplomacy in the 1930s instead of deterring, acceleratedJapanese expansion to transform a regional war in China into a two-front global war for the UnitedStates. Likewise, Japanese attempts to deter the United States from intervening in Asia producedU.S. intervention on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, U.S. aid to the Nationalists causedlong-term Chinese Communist antipathy without any compensating Nationalist loyalty. In the shortterm, Russia alone achieved its intermediary goal to set up China in 1936 to fight Japan in 1937 sothat Japan and Germany would not combine against Russia in a fatal two-front war. Brokering theCommunist-Nationalist Second United Front was Stalin’s greatest diplomatic achievementbecause it saved communism in Russia. In the long term, however, Chinese animosity toward Russiabuilt as Chinese leaders slowly realized that Russia’s China policy was designed to meetRussian not Chinese goals and that these goals, despite their shared faith in communism, oftensharply diverged.

FEAR, AMBITION, DILEMMAS, NESTED WARS, AND PIVOTAL DECISIONS

Leaders in Japan, China, and Russia were all motivated by powerful ambitions and deep-seatedfears, which produced intractable dilemmas. Within living memory Japanese leaders had transformed atraditional society into a great power. They were intent upon retaining Japan’s place amongthe powers and carving out a role in international relations commensurate with its economic andpolitical achievements at home. With the Great Depression they feared for Japan’s economicwell-being in a world of escalating tariffs and spreading communism among the world’sunemployed. In particular, they feared Russian expansion in China and attempts to take advantage ofthe debilitating civil war that had broken out upon the fall of the Qing dynasty.