Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Mao and Zhu eventually relocated to Jiangxi province, where they
organized a rural soviet, a Communist-led regime that confiscated land
from greedy landlords, punished or executed them, and redistributed
their land to poor peasants. This simple programof land reformwas tre-
mendously appealing to Jiangxi's peasantry, and by early 1930 Mao's
Communist movement in the province was gaining enormous popular
support. This was ominous for Chiang Kai-shek, but he found even
more unsettling Zhu De's command over a Red Army emerging to pro-
tect the new soviet from attack. In November 1930 Chiang Kai-shek
launched the first of five “encirclement and extermination” campaigns
against the Jiangxi soviet. The first four were unsuccessful, but the fifth
in October 1933 succeeded in dislodging the Chinese Communists and
sending them on the epic Long March. They finally relocated in Yan'an
in the faraway northern province of Shaanxi.
JAPANESE AGGRESSION
Japan was undeniably the first nation in East Asia to modernize itself
effectively, and by the early twentieth century some Japanese chauvin-
ists and militarists envisioned that Japan would emerge as the next con-
quest dynasty in China and rule over the Chinese as the Mongols and
Manchus had done in previous centuries. Japanese militarists regarded
themselves and their country as the force that would save the rest of
East Asia and the Pacific islands from the twin perils of communism
and white man's imperialism. This would also allow Japan to establish
its own empire in the same area, but the Japanese imagined that East
Asia would prefer Japanese imperialism to Western imperialism. Even-
tually Japan originated a charming euphemism for its East Asian
empire: the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Japan's aggression against China began on September 18, 1931, when
Japanese forces manufactured a pretext to conquer Manchuria, or
China's northeast. The Japanese claimed that on this day a bomb
exploded on a train in Mukden, Manchuria, and that Japanese troops
investigating the explosion were fired upon. Japan therefore had no
choice but to take over all of Manchuria in self-defense. This action,
known as the Manchurian Incident or the Mukden Incident, was the
beginning of World War II for China. The next year, Japan transformed
Manchuria into an “independent” state and named it Manchukuo, or
the “Nation of Manchuria.” Japan then installed a puppet government
in Manchukuo that was headed up by Henry Pu Yi, the last Qing
emperor who was only a child of about three when his dynasty abdi-
cated in early 1912. The rest of the world was not fooled by Japan's
