Sarah Paine

China had been a failed state since 1911.

And it had had an escalating series of warlords fighting each other in this multilateral civil war.

And the Japanese were appalled, particularly after the United States passed the Holy Smoot Tariff of 1930 that cut them off from international trade.

So then they're thinking, now what?

Well, we're going to need an empire big enough to survive since no one's going to trade with us.

And so they invade all of Manchuria in 1931, and they have it pretty much stabilized by 1933.

So, okay, that was surprise number one.

But the rest of China is a mess.

And the Japanese, it's coalescing into a bilateral communist nationalist, nationalist under Chiang Kai-shek, communist under Mao Zedong fight with increasing dosages of Soviet aid.

And the Japanese are appalled with all this.

And so it's time to surprise everybody again in 1937.

And that's when they invade all the way down the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze River.

And it works.

They take a lot of territory really fast, but then they get to the end of the railway system.

Oh, and by the way, China's not pacified.

It's just churning.

And so now Japan is even more overextended.

As a result of doing that, Russian aid goes up and then you're gonna get USAID in there.

So the problem's actually getting worse.

Okay, time for another surprise, really big one.