China And The Origins Of The Pacific War 1931 41

Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Chinese government spent a decade attempting to promote an international coalition against Tokyo. The rationale for this policy was that as Japan's attempts to establish hegemony over East Asia inevitably threatened British, American, and Soviet interests, it could only be a matter of time before these powers recognized the need to intervene in direct support of China. That this assessment ultimately proved correct offered little comfort to the Chinese until 1941, but in this valuable and original new book Dr. Youli Sun argues that this is the key to an understanding of Chinese policy. China's appeal to the League of Nations, the secret approaches to the Soviet Union, the decision for War in 1937, and the subsequent informal understandings with the Soviet Union and the Anglo-American powers, all followed a consistent thread. The persistence of Chinese diplomacy and the continuation of war against Japan was, in the final analysis, critically important in preventing a possible American-Japanese accommodation and thus was a vital factor in the outbreak of the Pacific War.

Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Chinese government spent a decade attempting to promote an international coalition against Tokyo. The rationale for this policy was that as Japan's attempts to establish hegemony over East Asia inevitably threatened British, American, and Soviet interests, it could only be a matter of time before these powers recognized the need to intervene in direct support of China.

A GRAPHIC ACCOUNT OF WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO GIVE UNDER AN ALL-PERVASIVE STATE SYSTEM. SHOWS HOW MILITARISTIC AND RACIST ATTITUDES WERE DISSEMINATED THROUGH, SCHOOLS, ARMY, AND FAMILY.

"This book is the first volume in a trilogy that will offer a more complete account of the Pacific War than any previously published. While keeping a focus on the decade leading up to Pearl Harbor, Storm Clouds Over the Pacific goes back centuries to examine the origins of enmity between Japan and China and trace the deep animosities that drove the immensely destructive war in the Asia Pacific, exploring the love-hate relationship between East Asia's two oldest civilizations, conditioned by shifting geopolitical winds." -- Back cover.

The Wars for Asia, 1911 1949 shows that the Western treatment of World War II, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War as separate events misrepresents their overlapping connections and causes. The long Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbor and Western interests throughout the Pacific on December 7 8, 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China, and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars the Chinese Civil War (1911 1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931 1945), and World War II (1939 1945) together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century. While these events are history in the West, they live on in Japan and especially China."

Professor Iriye analyses the origins of the 1941 conflict against the background of international relations in the preceding decade in order to answer the key question: Why did Japan, which had not been able to defeat the isolated and divided forces of China, decide to go to war against so formidable a combination of powers?