A History of East Asia From the Origins of Civilization to the Twenty-First Century

In East Asia, the liberal Westernizing tendencies of the 1920s were replaced in the 1930s by authoritarian single-party rule in China and ultranationalistic militarism in Japan. Japan was wracked by a series of assassinations and attempted coups, which left the miliary in control. On the pretext of a staged explosion on the tracks of the Japanese-run South Manchurian Railroad (in China) in 1931, the Japanese army seized control over much of Manchuria and established a puppet state called Manchukuo. While Chiang Kai-shek struggled to put the Republic of China on a secure foundation, the rising communist leader Mao Zedong began experimenting with rural peasant revolution. After Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by his own generals and compelled to agree to a United Front with the Communists against Japan, a minor incident in July 1937 triggered the start of full-scale war with Japan. Japan’s inability to decisively defeat Nationalist China, then, led Japan to expand the war, eventually attacking Pearl Harbor and bringing the Allies into the war on China’s side.