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Historiographical Essay
WAR, Sun Tzu tells us, "is of vital importance to the state, being the arena in which life or death is decided and the pathway to survival or ruination." The Japanese invasion on 7 July 1937 put the Chinese Republic in mortal danger. In the end, the Republic prevailed. But China was devastated. The war also made possible a successful Communist revolution that destroyed traditional society. By 1945, Japan, too, was almost destroyed. Its empire lost and its political structure remade by its American conquerors, the country would eventually enter a new period of peaceful economic development. Both nations were fundamentally transformed by the conflict. The China-Japan war, the catalyst of these changes, is arguably the most important event in the history of East Asia in the twentieth century. This essay surveys much of the literature on that war, published since the 1970s, from its origins to its end.
The war began in 1937. However, the events leading to it started almost twenty years earlier. Marius Jansen describes how, until the end of the First World War in 1918, Japan had participated with other nations in the division of China into spheres of influence.1 Unfortunately, the Japanese were unable to adjust to the postwar anti-imperialist policies of the Soviet Union and the United States. Russia and the West were ultimately willing to accept a strong, united China in control of its own destiny. The Japanese, with a greater economic stake in the country, were not. Until 1945, the Japanese would not abandon their belief that China was a disunited collection of provinces that could be manipulated one against the other, and ultimately conquered piecemeal. This was one cause of the war.
William Kirby has described how intelligently the Chinese Republican leadership operated in the post-1918 world.2 They used obduracy, legalism, and economic boycotts to reduce Western treaty rights, including foreign control of Chinese maritime customs. But, the methods that worked so well against the West would prove useless at best, and counterproductive at worst, against Japan.
Unlike the Western powers, Japan had little reason to change its relations with China. The rise of provincial warlordism after 1916 demonstrated the fundamental disunity of the country. Japan had not been weakened, like Britain and...