(Part 1/3)

Since this is a bit of a two part question, I'll first focus on what the Japanese wanted to achieve before moving on to why they failed to achieve it. There's a lot to cover here so let's get going.

The fundamental issue of Japanese wargoals in China is that they constantly changed in response to the increasing cost of the Japanese war effort. To give a brief answer, the Japanese war effort in China was aimed to secure Japanese economic interests on continental Asia, both in securing a steady flow of raw resources back to Japan, but also a large market in the form of China's massive population. The Japanese were also highly concerned about the influence of communism, and their war in China was also aimed at defeating the Chinese Communists and securing their southern flank in the even of war with the Soviet Union. However, the situation is--of course--much more complicated than that, and also involves Japanese domestic politics, so let us step back a bit and give an overview of what the situation in China and Japan was like prior to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Sino-Japanese Relations Before the War

The Second Sino-Japanese War was--as the name might suggest--not the first time that Japan and China had clashed. To go back much further, in the 16th century, Japanese armies under Toyotomi Hideyoshi had invaded Korea and clashed with armies of the Ming Dynasty sent to defend China's tributary. More relevantly, the First Sino-Japanese War in the late 19th century had given Japan rule over Taiwan and removed Korea from the Qing sphere of influence, although the handover of the Liaodong Peninsula had been reversed by the Triple Intervention of Germany, Russia, and France. Victory in the Russo-Japanese War had given Japan a strong position in Manchuria, with control over the formerly Russian concessions in the Liaodong Peninsula and the South Manchurian Railway (known in Japanese as Mantetsu), and Japan established the soon to be infamous Kwantung Army to guard its new position in Manchuria. From the defeat of Russia in 1905, the situation in East Asia changed rapidly. In 1911, the Xinhai Revolution ended the Qing Dynasty, and marked the beginning of the warlord era in China, as various regional leaders took up arms against each other. The collapse of the German Empire saw Japan take over German concessions in the Shandong Peninsula, leading to an increasingly negative view of Japan amongst the Chinese public. In 1917, the Russian Empire collapses into civil war, with the Soviet Union established in 1922, alarming the Japanese, who now faced a communist government across the Sea of Japan. The situation in China was also ever changing, as various warlord coalitions formed, broke up, and fought against one another. Throughout the disintegration of China, Japan had dramatically expanded its economic presence in China. Japan's presence in Manchuria meant that they ended up very closely tied with Zhang Zuolin's Fengtian Clique, providing Zhang with substantial financial and military support. However, as Zhang began to drift away from Japan's sphere of influence, he was assassinated by officers of the Kwantung Army, who would later engineer the “Mukden Incident” in 1931 that would create the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo to replace Zhang's forces.

Japanese presence and influence in China was, of course, not limited to the north. During both the Warlord era and the subsequent Republican era, Japan intervened in China multiple times beyond the Japanese presence in Manchuria. In 1928, as Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition was in full swing, Japanese troops had clashed with advancing Nationalist forces around the city of Jinan in Shandong Province in the Jinan incident. Japanese forces had deployed to Jinan with the justification of defending Japanese commercial interest in the city. While the precise spark is disputed, a full scale clash quickly arose, and Chiang Kai-shek ultimately gave into Japanese demands so that he could focus on continuing the Northern Expedition on to Beijing along with the determination that China lacked the strength to fight Japan at this point. This intervention further deepened wide spread condemnation of Japanese actions by the Chinese public. In 1932, shortly after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, protests and clashes between Japanese and Chinese civilians in Shanghai—with the possible support of the Japanese military—escalated as the Imperial Japanese Navy landed shore parties in the city ostensibly to, again, protect Japanese commercial property and civilians. These shore parties again clashed with Chinese Nationalist troops and the Japanese responded by escalating, deploying aircraft from the Navy's carriers and Army reinforcements to drive back the Chinese and earn substantial concessions for Japan around the city. Again Chiang was forced to back down, agreeing to withdraw his forces from around the city, but the apparent continual demands by Japan for more and more Chinese territory and concessions further turned Chinese public opinion against Japan. This popular anger at Japan would be a major influence in Chiang's future policy related to Japan.