Sino-Japanese Relations

Traditionally, China and Japan had always regarded their respective civilizations as intrinsically superior to all others. For many centuries their cultures had indeed equalled or even exceeded the achievements of the West. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, both countries had been overtaken by Western empires in almost every sphere; commercially, militarily, culturally and politically China and Japan had become relative backwaters. The Japanese emperors were not afraid of reform and reacted quickly to the situation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan had built a modern army and navy and had reformed itself politically, socially and economically; it was wealthy and increasingly industrialized. As we have seen, however, the Chinese had not been so willing to embrace change and instead had suffered the humiliation of foreign incursions on their own soil, including those of the Japanese, their nearest and greatest rival. Encroachments on China continued in the new century as the Japanese were ceded the former German concessionary rights to Shandong province in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; this broke the undertaking given just a year before that they would revert to China.

These long-standing tensions between China and Japan were to become more marked in the 1920s. The American governments followed a protectionist economic policy which meant that foreign countries attempting to trade with the United States faced prohibitively high tariffs. This particularly affected the Japanese, who had come to depend on American markets to expand their economic activity. When their expensive goods failed to sell in the United States, the resulting lack of capital in Japan for buying raw materials caused a recession. In the face of economic hardship the Japanese government decided that the only solution was to acquire these raw materials by expanding their territorial boundaries in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Despite the fact that the Japanese had signed the Nine-Power Agreement in 1922, agreeing to respect the spheres of influence of the other powers, the Japanese embarked on a policy of imperial expansion in China in the 1920s and 1930s, leading to tension and conflict.

On 30 May 1925, in Shanghai, a large crowd of Chinese marched to protest the killing of native Chinese citizens by Japanese guards at a local factory.