Key Points

• The chaotic internal situation in China and the effort the Chinese government was required to put into the civil wars provided opportunities for Japanese expansionism. Japan saw Manchuria as a source of raw materials, a market for its manufactured goods, and as a protective buffer state against the Soviet Union in Siberia. Japan invaded Manchuria after the 1931 Mukden Incident. With appeasement being the predominant policy of the day, no country was willing to take action against Japan beyond tepid censure. Incessant fighting between Japanese and Chinese forces followed.
• The Chinese resistance stiffened after July 7, 1937, when a clash occurred between Chinese and Japanese troops outside Beijing. This skirmish led to open, although undeclared, warfare between China and Japan, which turned into the Second Sino-Japanese War. Shanghai fell after a three-month battle and the capital of Nanking fell in December 1937, which was followed by the Nanking Massacre.
• The United States and the Soviet Union put an end to the Second Sino-Japanese War by attacking the Japanese with atomic bombs (on America’s part) and an incursion into Manchuria (on the Soviet Union’s part). Japanese Emperor Hirohito officially capitulated to the Allies on August 15, 1945. The Chinese-Japanese conflict lasted for over eight years and its casualties were more than half of total casualties of the Pacific War.
• During World War II, the United States emerged as a major player in Chinese affairs. As an ally it embarked in late 1941 on a program of massive military and financial aid to the hard-pressed Nationalist Government. In 1943, the United States and Britain led the way in revising their treaties with China, bringing to an end a century of unequal treaty relations.
• After the end of the war in August 1945, the Nationalist Government moved back to Nanking. With American help, Nationalist troops moved to take the Japanese surrender in North China. The Soviet Union, as part of the Yalta agreement allowing a Soviet sphere of influence in Manchuria, dismantled and removed more than half the industrial equipment left there by the Japanese. The Soviet presence in northeast China enabled the Communists to move in long enough to arm themselves with the equipment surrendered by the withdrawing Japanese army.
• In 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt devised the name “United Nations.” He referred to the Big Three and China as a “trusteeship of the powerful” and then later the “Four Policemen.” At the Potsdam Conference of 1945, Harry Truman proposed that the foreign ministers of China, France, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States “should draft the peace treaties and boundary settlements of Europe,” which led to the creation of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the “Big Five” and soon thereafter the establishment of those states as the permanent members of the UN Security Council.