The Japanese Imperial Army managed to take Wuhan but found it difficult to keep up their previous momentum as Chinese defensive efforts and counter-insurgency begin to wear on the Japanese supply line and threaten to reverse their previous gains.
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident which sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy would press on to take Shanghai, Nanjing, and Xuzhou, driving Chinese defenders back and committing horrific war crimes and atrocities along the way.
Following its investigation into the Mukden Incident and subsequent Japanese occupation of northeast China, the League of Nations demands that Japan withdraw its troops and return the territory they’ve seized. Japan responds by withdrawing from the League of Nations.
Three years after the assassination of Zhang Zuolin and attempted framing of the KMT, a group of higher-ranking officers within the Kwantung Army staged another false flag attack, which resulted in their conquest of northeast China and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo.
In 1928, a group of officers in the Kwantung Army attempted to frame the KMT for their own assassination of Zhang Zuolin. The failed attempts to enforce accountability and discipline which followed set the stage for similar incidents in the future.
The new international status quo that emerged after the first World War was very different than what came before, and Japan was poised to become a major new power in this new world.
The eastern front of the first world war was much busier than its western counterpart and the stakes for one nation were much higher. When the war finally ended with the Entente triumphant, Japan was poised to enjoy the advantages of supporting the winning side.
The assassination of an Austrian Archduke sparks a chain reaction which would ignite a global conflict on a scale never seen before.
In early 1912, the Qing Dynasty officially transferred its right to rule to the Republic of China, who named Yuan Shikai as their president in exchange for ending the civil war. Shikai, however, would soon prove just as power-hungry and authoritarian as the imperial system he sought to replace.
The first decade of the 1900s witnessed a final attempt by the Qing Dynasty to reform its outmoded systems of governance and forge a new Chinese nation state. Those attempts eventually failed in the wake of a massive revolution against the last dynasty of China, which succeeded in 1912.
Recent Comments