What did Japan WANT to achieve in China?

raharris1973

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Nothing that the Chinese could have lived with. The Japanese military was going to react with force to anything that was not "sincere submission". The kooky officer cliques clicked off the wave of intrigue that led to Manchukuo and the full second Sino-Japanese War by illogically killing their own client Zhang Zuolin (whom they had had a profitable and positive relationship with) and then seeing every subsequent disturbance as a reason to use the Army.

Japanese aggressive "strategy" from the Zuolin assassination of 1928 on was the ultimate "self-licking ice cream cone". It specialized in creating a "need" for itself.
 
Was there ANYTHING that Japan would have regarded as a victory?

The problem about asking if there was anything that Japan would have regarded as victory, is it assumes that there was even anything close to a consensus in the Japanese leadership, to say nothing of the officer corps, of what ‘victory’ in China meant. There were those who wanted to colonize China, those who wanted to break it up and create several puppet states, those who wanted a semi-united China reduced to a state of servitude, and those who theoretically wanted to ‘liberate’ China from its own internal discord and make it into a friendly nation that could join Japan against the Western powers. There simply wasn’t even anything approaching consensus about what they wanted; post-1937, they invaded and then eventually just threw everything they had in the hopes that China would submit.

In general, at the very most, they wanted to subjugate China. They thought too, that because China would fall in just a few months, that they could work out all their differences between their conflicting visions in peace and without any major disturbances. When the Chinese- surprisingly- fought back, since they didn’t even have a clear goal from the beginning about how and for what they were waging the campaign over beyond simply subjugating China, it meant with every ‘victory’ they got dragged deeper into a giant mess, as they would have to defend whatever they had gained, meaning going deeper into China to strike back against the inevitable source of resistance, meaning if they were lucky yet another ‘victory’, meaning having to defend yet another gain, meaning then have to strike at yet another source of resistance and so on, until basically the whole thing degenerated into a giant, unfeasible campaign of trying to occupy the entirety of China. It’s telling that while the Nazis did have a crackpot idea of Lebensraum, they at least had an idea, with Hitler having even gone to the effort of weighing the alliance alternatives in Mein Kampf, along with the Nazi leadership making their extensive, horrible plans for the administration of the occupied territories; the Japanese militarist leadership didn’t even have that- they didn’t have a single, over-arching plan for what the heck they wanted to do in China, except repeatedly telling Emperor Showa that ‘soon’ China would be subjugated, and trying to enforce their rule and power the war machine in all kinds of ways across the occupied territories.

Nothing that the Chinese could have lived with. The Japanese military was going to react with force to anything that was not "sincere submission". The kooky officer cliques clicked off the wave of intrigue that led to Manchukuo and the full second Sino-Japanese War by illogically killing their own client Zhang Zuolin (whom they had had a profitable and positive relationship with) and then seeing every subsequent disturbance as a reason to use the Army.

Japanese aggressive "strategy" from the Zuolin assassination of 1928 on was the ultimate "self-licking ice cream cone". It specialized in creating a "need" for itself.

As raharris1973 has well pointed out, nothing the Chinese could have lived with, and especially so considering that the chances of the pan-Asian idealists winning out are pretty slim, and even then, most of them still thought Japan would be the leader of said pan-Asian alliance. Not only would the military react with force to anything it didn’t consider ‘sincere submission’, it was going to do so after expecting the local population to willingly become their servants and then being outraged at resistance; but most importantly, even if the Japanese political and military leadership had actually formulated a clear plan and policy of what they wanted and how they were going to achieve it, they had little to no ability to enforce it because if they did, they’d probably get shot by some fanatic militarist. When it comes to Imperial Japan during this time period, I wouldn’t just say ‘kooky officer cliques’, I’d say they were batshit insane. Gekokujo was the one of the most idiotic things that ever plagued the Imperial Japanese military.

While the assassination of Zhang Zuolin stemmed from his disastrous defeat against the KMT- who it must be remembered, were backed by Moscow- and thus being no longer seen as of use, it was done by a group of officers who wisely took it upon themselves to plant a bomb to ‘punish’ him for his failure, and because they thought young, opium-addicted Zhang Xueliang would be even easier to control. As we know, they were wrong about Zhang Xueliang, but through using some warped logic one can kind of understand what they thought they would be able to accomplish, even if it still is incredibly idiotic.

But what a lot of people miss it that the problem is even deeper than that- these young officers wanted to do something, they wanted to serve their empire, but found themselves hemmed in by an incredibly politicized and radicalized officer corps, with Japanese society plagued by corrupt politicians and powerful zaibatsu, while they found themselves unable to reform society or even advance in the military because of said politicized officer corps and the Peace Preservation Law, and thus found themselves drifting toward ever more radical politics, stuck watching in frustration at everything they thought was going wrong for Japan without being able to change it except through violence, which was channeled into the perennial militarist coups and then toward China; while the whole system of Japanese institutional society kind of collapsed on itself in the wake of 1926 and the utter disaster that the Great Depression was, it’s also telling that there were basically no coups after 1937, because all of the militarists were being sent to China to die over there.

But the problem of the militarists remains in that unless you solve them, there’s not even going to be a way to save Japan from going to war in China, and all the issues that plagued the ill-defined and ill-executed campaign, because they’re going to go charging at it like a bunch of starving wolves- in fact, until you solve the problem of the militarists there’s not even going to be a way to speak of what ‘Japan wanted’, because there isn’t even going to be a semblance of a united Japan and ‘Japanese policy’ over what the heck they even wanted to do. A lot of people think the 1932 Manchurian invasion was the point of no return, but what they probably don’t know was that the entire campaign to invade Manchuria was basically created by four frustrated officers on leave in Port Arthur who decided they were going to (please excuse my language) fuck China up or die trying.
 
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raharris1973

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The role of the Japanese military at this time reminds me of the Pakistani military and ISI. The difference being that the latter have only led their country into terrorism, insurgency and short conventional wars. The Japanese did the same thing but had a weak enough enemy in front of them they could keep escalating and throw their tanks, aircraft and fleet into the mix.
 
In reality, by controlling Manchukuo, the Japanese had gotten what they really needed from China, a source of raw materials, a food growing area, and an area that could be colonized. Given that Japan was so close, and the Europeans and the Americans with their own issues, Japan could have come to dominate China economically and could have played off the various factions to keep a strong unitary China from forming. BY escalating and continuing the war the put themselves in a situation where they would inevitably clash with the Europeans and Americans in open warfare. They were well in to the Chinese tar baby long before the surprising Nazi successes in Europe devastated the French and the Dutch and severely weakened the British. Had the Germans not had the successes of 1939-1940, but the war had been somewhat of a replay of WWI, there is no way the IJA and IJN could have achieved the successes they had OTL even with the same sort of rolling sixes.

It is not unusual that as a war goes on beyond what the original expectations are, that the demands on either side escalate. The more blood and treasure spent, the more the spoils of victory need to be to justify the sacrifices. The Japanese fell into this trap big time in China.
 
The role of the Japanese military at this time reminds me of the Pakistani military and ISI. The difference being that the latter have only led their country into terrorism, insurgency and short conventional wars. The Japanese did the same thing but had a weak enough enemy in front of them they could keep escalating and throw their tanks, aircraft and fleet into the mix.

Hm, as far as I know, it seems a pretty apt comparison, though I don’t know how much inter-service rivalry there is in Pakistan. Though I must say getting utterly defeated by India and only saved from full-on annexation because doing so would turn into a giant ulcer, but still having an obscene amount of power to this day, does seem telling, and not necessarily in a good way.

In reality, by controlling Manchukuo, the Japanese had gotten what they really needed from China, a source of raw materials, a food growing area, and an area that could be colonized. Given that Japan was so close, and the Europeans and the Americans with their own issues, Japan could have come to dominate China economically and could have played off the various factions to keep a strong unitary China from forming. BY escalating and continuing the war the put themselves in a situation where they would inevitably clash with the Europeans and Americans in open warfare. They were well in to the Chinese tar baby long before the surprising Nazi successes in Europe devastated the French and the Dutch and severely weakened the British. Had the Germans not had the successes of 1939-1940, but the war had been somewhat of a replay of WWI, there is no way the IJA and IJN could have achieved the successes they had OTL even with the same sort of rolling sixes.

It is not unusual that as a war goes on beyond what the original expectations are, that the demands on either side escalate. The more blood and treasure spent, the more the spoils of victory need to be to justify the sacrifices. The Japanese fell into this trap big time in China.

The problem is, how do you ‘control’ this thing called ‘Manchukuo’? While it does have an abundance of raw materials, lots of areas that can be used to grow food, and cities waiting for Japanese to come and colonize them, the questions remains: how do you establish long-term control over a massive territory, with over 30 million Han and a smattering of Manchu- few if any of whom really identify as such in a separatist manner as opposed to Chinese- and which Jiang Jieshi really, really wants to retake, with the backing of basically the entirety of China? They’ve already tried with Zhang Zuolin, and he got defeated, as are most of the other warlords you need to keep China weakened; Zhang Xueliang, though he is undoubtedly a capable commander and administrator (and handsome af), surprised them by openly declaring that he didn’t want to dance to their tune; trying for some reason to pre-empt that before he came to power, and install their own puppet as opposed to a subservient ally will reveal to China, if not the whole world, what they actually are aiming for. The problem is that they can only go so far in trying to indirectly control the territory when most of the people and leaders want to rejoin China anyways- but openly taking it is going unify almost every single warlord and inflame almost every single patriotic Chinese citizen against them, and thus eventually further drag them into war in China. It is the ultimate poisoned chalice for Imperial Japan in the time period- drink it, and you have a territory which will in one stroke solve so much of your problems, but at the cost of inflaming and uniting China and thus eventually leading you to what is basically going to be your doom.

Japan can be however close it wants, and the Europeans and Americans however occupied they need to be- even if Japan tries and manages to economically dominate most of China, Japan can only go so far before China is united enough to start fighting back. The relevant time period, after all, is when China is being unified; even though they could have tried to strike early, they would still have united the Chinese warlords against them, and there really isn’t much of a window anyways. The Anhui started out controlling most provinces and would likely be able to rally support if they’re defending China; the Zhili were not only already vehemently anti-Japanese- in the face of Japanese aggression people might have overlooked their dysfunctional government and Cao’s blatant ambition; until Zhang Zuolin’s defeat there’s really no need to start getting overt with actual military expansion, and until Zhang’s defeat Japan’s internal situation wasn’t as bad as what prompted the utter mess that happened post-1926. But even though Jiang was weak, the desire among most Chinese at this point was overwhelmingly for retaking Manchuria, considering the territory was majority-Han, and especially so when it was basically ripped off from a united China itself in a criminal manner.

In terms of escalation, the Japanese political and military leadership didn’t really have a choice in escalating the war, insofar as any attempt at taming the dysfunctional internal military situation would have killed them; they might as well have put a note on their back saying ‘please, shoot me’. Once they were in China because of the idiocy of the militarist officer groups, there wasn’t any way of pulling out, both because doing so would unravel everything they had fought for, but also because it would have been another thing for which they could have been shot, and because it was a great way to get rid of all the radical militarists by having them die over there. Even then, lots of Japanese militarist officer groups wanted to go to war against the Western powers anyways and were planning to do so after they had subjugated China; what basically happened was that events in China, both were in themselves butterflies and caused a bunch of other butterflies that led to the whole schedule of who to invade next being moved up by a few leagues.

Furthermore, German success or not, even if the war went that badly, they’d just send in more troops in the hope that the war would eventually turn in their favor, because ‘Yamato-damashii will overcome all difficulties’ is still the dominant idea among the militarist officer groups, who will be more than happy to administer a lead pill at high velocity into the brain of anybody who says otherwise to ‘cure’ them of their treason. Despite the absolutely appalling atrocity the invasion in 1937 was, it is undeniable that it was initially wildly successful, and the war effort actually only came to a stalemate in 1939-1940 when the Chinese went on the counter-offensive; in fact, 1940 can be said to be the moment the Japanese war effort really got bogged down in the utter mess it had created for itself in China. 1939-1940 and the following years are the years of success against the Western powers; by that point in China, Japan is already fighting what had begun to become a losing battle.

Even then, not only was this a war that they fought despite appalling casualties, across massive distances and a far more populous enemy, but one they fought even though any sane military leadership and government would know better and otherwise from the start. It’s not just that as the war goes on the demands escalate; the war demands in the case of the Japanese military leadership- insofar as they had any- were so vague and unrealistic from the start so as to be ridiculous, merely compounded by the fanaticism and narcissism of the militarists that was unleashed as the war in China ground on.
 
Based on their actions manchukuo mengjiang Wang regime I would say their ultimate objective was to break China into multiple puppet states
 
All this make Japanese strategy & goals vs the US seem rational and clear.

Well, to be fair their strategic logic was fairly sound. It's just their goal was well behoynd their capabilities and their basal assumptions about the US responses and their own capabilities/power were grossly inaccurate.
 
It seems like the Japanese assumed the same thing about China that they did about the United States—namely that the Chinese were “weak-willed” and “lesser people” who would submit before the superior Japanese spirit and nation.

Then, of course, the toxic military culture of Japan compounded these issues, making it impossible to have a dissenting opinion once initial assumptions had been proven terribly wrong.
 
Could a create Japanese military leader arrange a marriage between Puyi and a Japanese royal to "unify" east asia 1984-style?
 

raharris1973

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The toxic military culture of Japan brings up a point. If it was internally driven by its own institutional/domestic imperatives, does that mean that even if neither the Kuomintang nor Communists nor United Front emerge to take national leadership from the Beiyang Warlords as they did with the "Northern Expedition", that the Japanese will find just another convenient excuse to justify the creation of Manchukuo in the early 1930s? And then from their, the IJA needs to buffer it and has the excuse that the next warlord over from their front-line had gotten "Sassy" with them? Only in this process perhaps the Japanese could keep absorbing more until they occupy all the productive/fertile lands of China proper, because their enemies are simple militarists, not also mass national parties?
 
The toxic military culture of Japan brings up a point. If it was internally driven by its own institutional/domestic imperatives, does that mean that even if neither the Kuomintang nor Communists nor United Front emerge to take national leadership from the Beiyang Warlords as they did with the "Northern Expedition", that the Japanese will find just another convenient excuse to justify the creation of Manchukuo in the early 1930s? And then from their, the IJA needs to buffer it and has the excuse that the next warlord over from their front-line had gotten "Sassy" with them? Only in this process perhaps the Japanese could keep absorbing more until they occupy all the productive/fertile lands of China proper, because their enemies are simple militarists, not also mass national parties?

In my humble opinion, in the unlikely event that neither the KMT or Communists or United Front manage to pull off a Northern Expedition and subjugation of the warlords, while it is likely that certain parts of the military will still be looking for a chance to create a so-called ‘Manchukuo’, the problem is that much of the train of events were arguably driven by Zhang Zuolin’s defeat and Zhang Xueliang’s ‘betrayal’ by bending the knee to Jiang. There was simply too much invested into the Northeastern provinces, both economically and strategically, that these militarist officers simply couldn’t stomach it all being handed over to the KMT and Jiang. While I believe that it is highly unlikely that China will not remain disunited, if neither of these specific events and other, necessary events in China and Japan, happen, it’s likely that those who favor the indirect approach may win. There’s not been a stinging defeat of the man they supported, no ‘betrayal’ by his son, no likely loss of the extensive investments they- and the zaibatsu for that matter, who often enough did support the militarists- have made in China to a mass national party supported by Moscow. In the unlikely event that China remains fragmented and Japan does not collapse on itself, then it is likely that they may very well go for the indirect approach.

The problem with this however, is that it very much depends on how events play out in China and Japan itself- on how much support, if any, the KMT is getting from Moscow and their overall ideological agenda; on how much the warlords remain disunited and open to manipulation by the Japanese or if they band together in a grand coalition; on how the ripples of what happens in China influences the internal situation in Japan, both militarily, politically and socially; on how much events in Japan itself transpire to influence the rapidly and seriously deteriorating situation in Japan. If Japan still collapses on itself and the batshit insane militarists still get enough power that they did OTL, it is indeed very likely that any provocation does lead to some kind of intervention to ‘punish’ such behavior, but they may also use warlords as buffer states on their frontiers if enough of the militarists are instead busy trying to kill each other- which, considering gekokujo and radicalization, isn’t actually all that difficult to imagine.

However, in my humble opinion, even if the Japanese try, it still seems incredibly unlikely that they, simply because the Chinese are more disunited, would be able to occupy all the ‘productive/fertile lands of China proper’, for three reasons.

One, as said this is still the period of unification. Even if the KMT and all their major political rivals somehow get eliminated, there is still simple Chinese patriotism. Even if all the choices available to the Chinese people are Chinese militarists, those militarists can still draw upon the fact that people do not want to be dominated by a foreign power, and thus inspire them to fight and resist- not to mention that people themselves will very likely be taking up arms against the invader, no matter how gradually said invader may move, or how much relative order they may be bringing in comparison to the previous state of warlordism. Even if the distinct political ideology and structural organization of the parties may not be there, the underlying foundation of the patriotism of the Chinese people is not something that the KMT or the Communists have some kind of monopoly on. Indeed, one might see some charismatic warlord who is either a patriot or wishes to use the sentiment do so successfully, due to the lack of greater political alternatives such as the KMT and Communists- heck, we might even see Yan or some ATL version of him get to try out his ideas on a substantially bigger portion of China.

Second, the fertile and productive areas of China proper cover a huge area. Even if the Japanese invest everything they have into occupying it they will still be over-stretched, and even a minor rebellion will be enough under such circumstances to seriously threaten their hold, if not immediately at least in its repercussions when the inevitable incidents of brutality occur in response. Aside from the fact that the Chinese people themselves will see more and more of their country occupied by the Japanese, which will very likely not go down well at all, this will be an open announcement to the rest of the world that the Japanese government apparently wants to dominate China, and the US obviously is not going to like that, nor for that matter anyone else with stakes in China. Even then, there are still going to be militarist radicals who theoretically want to ‘liberate’ China and will see the occupation as a betrayal of that ideal, and no matter how few they may be, if the overriding war against a united China does not solve the problem of militarists the way it did OTL, they will have the chance to carry out some more gekokujo idiocy.

Third, the aforementioned problem of toxic militarism. The very thing that allows any Japanese government and military to be crazy enough to let the radical militarists entertain and execute such an insane idea as subjugating China is going to lead to it being unable to actually manage to do so. The kind of people who were able to ‘persuade’ the government to embark on such a campaign were often the very same people who were the psychotically fanatic, narcissistic and brutal criminals who made the entire thing degenerate into an unfeasible campaign and utter mess. Even the radical militarists who wanted to ‘liberate’ China wanted to do so on their own terms, and as said, most of them still believed China would be a subservient ally; as for the majority of what their colleagues believed, as mentioned it ranged from colonialism to puppetization, none of which would go down well, and said resistance to it by the Chinese people being something most of them would never be able to suppress in any remotely civilized manner anyways.
 

raharris1973

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So regime type in China doesn't really matter for its defense. National culture and geography drives all. No matter how uncentralized you'll see the Japanese never take Sichuan, Yunnan, Shaanxi and Gansu? Because that's about all that was left of "productive China" (Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet don't really count) by 1945 even in OTL.
 
So regime type in China doesn't really matter for its defense. National culture and geography drives all. No matter how uncentralized you'll see the Japanese never take Sichuan, Yunnan, Shaanxi and Gansu? Because that's about all that was left of "productive China" (Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet don't really count) by 1945 even in OTL.

Hang on, I don’t believe I said that. What I said was that out of the Chinese population- which is well over 400 million- there will be those who oppose that their entire country is being invaded by the Japanese militarists, something that was true OTL and barring some major change will be so ATL. In comparison, the population of Japan proper in 1940 numbered around 75 million, and the important part is simply to notice the massive disparity in numbers right there. Even if half of the entirety of China surrenders to Japan, that’s still 200 million people who are opposed to the Japanese militarists. Even if it’s only every tenth person who resists, that’s still 40 million enemy combatants. That’s still more than six and a half times more people than the IJA at its peak, and assumes it is disciplined enough to not have officers engage in the kind of behavior that swells the numbers of the resistance.

Connected to that, first of all, of course regime types matter, and they do so for attack as well. If the Japanese government and military are crazy enough to invade China due to the radical militarists, then it means the campaign will be plagued by similar issues to those that plagued it OTL, which will most likely unite a substantial number of the Chinese people against the militarist invaders. And of course, regime types do matter for defense, and I pointed out that in the unlikely scenario that China is not unified, the warlords continue and the Japanese militarists try a more limited approach, they might get away with some more warlords under their control, or for that matter that a Chinese counter-offensive in the absence of the KMT or the Communists might see someone like Yan leading the war effort with the implications that entail; what I disagreed with was the idea that simply because there is no KMT or Communists and lots of more surviving warlords, a nation that has conceived of itself as destined to be a united entity for the past 2000 years would simply let itself be slowly absorbed by a nation they consider foreign and which has issues all of its own before it tries to absorb all of China into its empire.

And because yes, national culture and geography drive much of what societies based around those concepts do, because they form the foundations for what people consider to be right and wrong for themselves and their nation. National culture and geography do not drive all, but the former forms the basis for people’s conceptions of what society should be like, and the latter influences the ability of whatever ruling polity that espouses such ideas to implement it, which together interact with the actual regime types to form the kind of society that ultimately results.

I further would like to dispute the idea that ‘Sichuan, Yunnan, Shaanxi and Gansu’ were all that was left of ‘productive China’ by 1945. If we take the idea of Yunnan and Gansu as ‘productive China’, there was also Fujian, Guangxi, Guangdong, parts of Zhejiang, and most of Jiangxi, Hunan and Henan; and importantly, this was with the IJA suffering appalling casualties and throwing everything it could spare in China at the provinces, but still with extensive local resistance that often enough made the pretense of effective control seem like wishful thinking, and no sign yet of the entirety of China simply laying down all of its weapons and surrendering. While this will of course be different if there are no KMT or Communists to pledge allegiance to, if your village is suddenly invaded and- again, considering the people who led the invasion of China- subjected to servitude and worse, does it really matter at the moment of resistance if you pledge allegiance to the KMT, or the Communists, or the local warlord who, perhaps, at least isn’t exploiting you for the sake of a foreign nation? Even then, if we assume the Japanese are able to defeat all the main warlords, how likely is it that a Japan crazy enough to embark upon a conquest of all of China will be able to remain measured and civilized in its suppression of the inevitable revolts that will transpire against its rule, and may I add, probably within short time? We are again talking about 400 million people spread across vast distances, who have gone through years of division and warlordism, and are now supposedly going to allow a foreign nation to absorb their entire nation into their empire to be exploited as it sees fit, compounded by the fact that the military that is supposed to enforce this has some serious issues with discipline, fanaticism and brutality that makes most warlords seem nice.

Furthermore, why doesn’t Inner Mongolia count? While obviously in this time period Tibet is not a part of ‘productive China’, and while the Ma were still on the side of the KMT, provided weapons and soldiers, and generally forced the Japanese to attack them as well, they were also not a hotbed of industrial production; Inner Mongolia however, has industries and an existing coal industry in the region by that time, and has been majority-Han since the mid-19th century, and as OTL, most of whom do not want China to fall to the Japanese militarists and some of whom will thus take up arms. If we define Gansu as ‘productive China’, while I agree that Tibet and Xinjiang do not qualify, I do believe we should also define Inner Mongolia as ‘productive China’ in such a case.

I do not dispute that if China was decentralized to the degree that the Japanese militarists could simply come in and play all of them off as they slowly conquer them piece-meal, it might be possible, but the problem is that as far as the facts we have tell us, that’s very unlikely. I said however, unlikely- I never said impossible in the manner of ‘no matter’, I said unlikely, in varying degrees, and this one just so happens to be very much so.
 
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