The Manchurian Crisis: 1931

Abstract

On the 18 September 1931 Japanese forces launched an unauthorised assault on North-Eastern China (Manchuria). The effects of the Depression in Japan and the resurgence of nationalism in China had combined to break the rotting tether which bound the army on the Kwantung peninsula to the restraining hand of Shidehara diplomacy.1 Moscow was directly interested in the crisis because the pretext for aggression was the explosion of a bomb at Mukden on the South Manchurian Railway. Further up the line lay the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), which the Soviet Government had inherited from its predecessors and defended from forcible seizure by the Nationalists (Kuomintang) and their allies in 1929. Sustained possession of the railway testified to continued preoccupations about the balance of power in the region,2 originally aroused by Japanese military intervention in the Soviet Far East from 1918 to 1922, bolstered by Britain’s bombardment of Nanking in 1927 and consolidated by the consequent conversion of the Kuomintang into a partner of the West. The Russians were not merely passive observers, however. They actively sought the unification of an anti-imperialist China and this, despite the debilitated condition of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), played its part in turning Tokyo against Moscow, at a time when the Depression accentuated Japanese dependence on Manchuria as a secure and vital source of raw materials, as a focus for trade and investment, as well as a place of settlement for “excess” population; likewise the sight of Eastern Siberia’s vast expanse also whetted the appetites of the land hungry in huddled Japan.