its cohesion, as Stalin knew, could not be taken for granted. He was
anxious to seal the Soviet Union’s frontiers: after 1930, border
populations with uncertain sympathies were brusquely relocated.62
He feared an attack from the east by Japan, whom he sought to
appease (by selling Russia’s railway rights in Manchuria) while
rebuilding his military and naval presence.63 But he feared even
more an attack from the west, where the loss of Poland and the
Baltic provinces had drastically weakened Russia’s strategic
position, not least in relation to the doubtfully loyal Ukraine. Hence
Soviet policy was above all to keep on good terms with Germany.
Economic and (discreet) military cooperation had been close in the
1920s. Hitler’s rise to power forced a reappraisal: Stalin entered the
League (1934) and made a pact with France. His preference,
however, was to guard Soviet safety by avoiding a break with the
Nazi state. There was no serious intent to align with the League,
whose motives he mistrusted. In Europe (by covert intervention in
the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9) and in East Asia (by military help to
the Kuomintang) Stalin played a lone hand.
The fourth zone was East Asia. Its post-war settlement was a
tripartite arrangement between Britain, Japan and the United States.
But it quickly became obvious that its fate was to be a contested
sphere where neither the League nor any great power would have
decisive authority. By the mid-1920s the British (who had the
largest foreign stake in East Asia) were on the defensive, fearful that
an insurgent nationalism would bundle them out of their treaty-port
enclaves and make even Hong Kong a heavy liability. They sent a
force to Shanghai in 1927, but were anxious to parley with the
Kuomintang. The United States, with much less at stake (in 1931,
American investment in China was only 6 per cent of the foreign
total, far behind Britain with 37 per cent, Japan with 35 per cent,
and even Russia with 8.4 per cent),64 preferred to rely upon good
relations with the Kuomintangregime, some of whose leading gures
had strong American links. The Americans were keen to draw the
Kuomintang away from its Russian connections. The same antipathy
to Soviet in uence made them reluctant to antagonize Japan, the
Soviet Union’s main enemy in North East Asia. When Japan
occupied Manchuria in 1931, the United States expressed strong
disapproval, but drewback from active opposition, hoping that the
politicians in Tokyo would restrain the army.65 The cooling of
Anglo-American relations after 1931 – the result in part of economic
friction – removed the main guarantee that the ‘Washington system’
would be upheld in East Asia.
After 1931, what mattered most was the triangular rivalry of the
Kuomintang government, nowbased in Nanking, the Soviet Union,
anxiously reinforcing its colonial presence, and imperial Japan. The
Nanking government had emerged victorious from the civil wars of
1928–31 that combined with famine to cost the lives of 6 million
people.66 But it fell short of enjoying a monopoly of force (the acid
test of e ective rule) across China proper. It was powerless to
prevent the savage Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932, when
Chinese anger at the occupation of Manchuria spilled over into
violence against local Japanese interests. Under Chiang Kai-shek, in
1928 the Kuomintang leadership had broken decisively with the
Communist elements of the party and had driven them out. But
although the Kuomintang onslaught on the Kiangsi/Jiangxi ‘soviet’
forced Mao and his followers into an epic withdrawal, the ‘Long
March’ to safe havens in north-west China in 1934–5, the
Communists survived to ght another day under Soviet patronage.
Soviet action in East Asia was designed to shore up Moscow’s
in uence, prevent the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party,
and check Japan’s incursions into Inner Asia and its domination of
China. But it was hampered by military and logistical weakness,
Kuomintang animosity, and (as we have seen) fear of provoking a
war on two fronts.
The initiative in East Asia was held by Japan. Japan’s strength was
disparaged by the Western powers in the 1920s: ‘a weak rather than
a strong Power’ said the British ambassador in 1924.67 In fact the
Washington treaties, which forbade new forti cations in the western
Paci c (including the British base at Hong Kong), had made Japan
less vulnerable to a naval attack than before 1914. Tokyo’s
policywas to avoid confrontation with the British and Americans,
but to consolidate its grip in Manchuria by a virtual protectorate
over its warlord ruler.68 Manchuria was the centrepiece of Japanese
thinking. It obsessed the army, whose reputation had been made
there. It was the great bastion against Russia’s regional comeback.
Its economic importance as a vast frontier region was taken for
granted. After 1928, however, Japan’s informal predominance came
under growing pressure from a more assertive China. There was
more and more friction with the South Manchurian Railway –
Japan’s commercial octopus – and with the Kwantung army that
guarded the ‘railway zone’. When the Kwantung army staged a
violent incident and then occupied Mukden, the Manchurian capital,
in September 1931, Tokyo gave its reluctant assent. The severity of
depression and the united opposition of army and navy to the
disarmament clauses that Japan had accepted at the London Naval
Conference of 1930 had created a newpolitical mood.69 Japan left
the League of Nations (in 1933), repudiated the Washington treaties
by creating the puppet state of Manchukuo, and was drawn deeper
and deeper into northern China. As the Kuomintang government
prepared for the struggle,70 the real uncertainties were when war
would break out, who else would take part, how it would end, and
what e ects it would have on a fractured world order.
The failure to build a post-war system through which the most
powerful countries could settle their di erences and build coalitions
against rule-breaking states might have been mitigated by economic
good feeling. In the mid-1920s it looked as if the great commercial
recovery would do this, and more. A dynamic world economy would
draw America towards Europe, encourage liberalism in Germany,
disarm Japanese fears, and keep the door ajar between the West and
Russia. The erce contraction of trade that had set in by 1930 had
the reverse e ect. Much the hardest hit were those who relied upon
primary products as their main source of income: as their incomes
collapsed, so did their buying. As markets slumped and prices fell