On the twenty-second of June 1941, Germany and its Axis allies invaded the Soviet Union. Their objective was never to march all the way to Moscow. The plan called for the Wehrmacht to advance to the Archangel-Astrakhan line, the so-called AA line, and then destroy whatever Soviet industry remained east of it through aerial bombardment. The question of what Japan intended to do with China during the Second Sino-Japanese War is often asked in the same breath, because the two campaigns share so many uncomfortable similarities.
Both were wars of conquest launched by an industrial power against a much larger, much poorer continental giant. Both aggressors expected a short, decisive conflict. Japan believed China would collapse once a few key cities fell. Germany was convinced the Soviet Union would crumble after Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev were taken.
Both miscalculated the resilience of their enemies, who absorbed staggering losses and refused to surrender. Both wars became brutal wars of attrition, with occupied zones marked by atrocities, scorched-earth tactics, and fierce partisan resistance that tied down vast numbers of troops. And in both cases, the aggressor overextended its supply lines, drained its manpower, and set the stage for its own destruction. The Japanese invasion of China was not the first time the two nations had clashed.
Under the Qing dynasty, China had already tasted defeat. The First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895 ended with an unequal treaty that forced China to pay a massive indemnity, cede Taiwan, and effectively give up its influence over Korea. Japan had fought a short war, defeated a dramatically larger adversary, and profited handsomely. Then came 1931.
After the Mukden Incident, a false flag operation staged by Japanese military personnel, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria, turning it into a puppet state called Manchukuo. That campaign, too, was quick and successful. Japanese leaders looked at their own military record and saw a pattern: they fought, they won, they took what they wanted. They studied what they had done right but never considered what their enemies had done wrong.
Japan had not so much won these earlier wars as its adversaries had lost them. There was no reason, the thinking went, why invading the rest of China would not proceed just as smoothly. Full-scale war came in 1937 after the Marco Polo Bridge incident. The conflict, known as the Second Sino-Japanese War, would later merge into the wider Second World War as Japan expanded its operations into Southeast Asia.
When the invasion began, many Japanese believed it would be a walk in the park. They had beaten China before, and they were now invading a country middle of a civil war. They did not expect much resistance. They were wrong.
The battle for the coastal city of Shanghai lasted many bloody months. The Chinese counterattack was so ferocious that at one point Japanese forces were almost pushed into the Whangpoo River, only saved by the heavy guns of their warships. Reinforcements arrived, fresh landings were made near the Wusong Fort, and the city finally fell. But the cost had been enormous, and the capture of Shanghai opened the road to Nanjing, then the capital of China.
It was there that the Chinese bore the full brunt of Japanese wartime barbarity. During the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered, and countless women became victims of systematic abuse. So what was Japan’s overall strategy in China? The ideology driving the invasion deserves some scrutiny.
Both Japanese and German thinking placed their own nation at the top of a racial hierarchy. Japanese propaganda cast China as backward, a country in desperate need of Japan’s guidance and control. This echoed Nazi ideology, which described Slavs as inferior and pursued a murderous program of living space, enslavement, starvation, and extermination. But there was a crucial difference.
Japan, though brutal, did not plan the outright annihilation of the Chinese population. The goal was not a blank slate. Japan wanted a submissive, economically useful China. Chinese people were seen as exploitable labor and a market, not as a people to be wiped off the earth.
To make this vision work, Japan set up a series of puppet regimes across the occupied territories. The most well known was Manchukuo, established in 1932 after the pacification of the northeastern region. The earlier deposed Chinese emperor, Puyi, was placed on the throne. He had no real power.
Manchukuo was a puppet state in every meaningful sense. Another regime was the Wang Jingwei government, officially called the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, with its capital in Nanjing. Wang Jingwei was a former official of the Chinese Nationalists, the Kuomintang, and a political rival of Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader. A third puppet state was Mengjiang, led by Demchugdongrub, a Mongolian prince who commanded troops in Inner Mongolia, a region bordering the country of Mongolia.
These puppet states had flags, leaders, and even armies, but their autonomy was largely cosmetic. Japan held the reins on foreign policy, security, and economic exploitation. The show of sovereignty was just that, a show. Japan’s military was not designed for a prolonged campaign.
It was built to deliver a quick, decisive victory in set-piece battles, not to slog through a drawn-out war with secure supply lines and long-term occupation. Japan never had a clear, unified plan for China. Politically, there were constant tensions between the official collaborationist governments and the Japanese military, which often behaved as if occupied zones were its private domain. Military strategy was inconsistent.
Commanders launched uncoordinated offensives for personal glory, and plans to break Chinese resistance kept shifting as expectations collapsed. The army’s logistical limitations made the kind of victory Japan craved impossible. Every attempt to force China into submission failed, and both the Nationalists and the Communists kept up the fight. Guerrilla warfare, the sheer size of China, and Japan’s limited logistics made complete control impossible.
There was also a deeper political blindness at work. Japanese officers failed to recognize how their own strategy fueled Chinese nationalism. Japanese brutality gave ordinary Chinese people a common cause. Each new act of violence, reported by the press or carried by word of mouth along the rail lines, deepened Chinese unity and hatred against a common enemy.
Japan made things worse by ordering its armies to live off the land. This meant requisitioning food and supplies directly from local populations without compensation. The approach saved money but ignored the political consequences entirely. During the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Japan had carefully paid Chinese producers for goods, thereby avoiding hostility.
The shift in policy in the 1930s directly alienated the very population they hoped to dominate. When Japan escalated the conflict in 1937, the leadership did not set out to conquer all of China. The initial objective was to deliver a quick, decisive blow by seizing key political and economic centers like Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and later Wuhan. The expectation was that Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government would surrender after losing its heartland.
The plan was to install a compliant puppet regime that would secure Japan’s dominance while sparing Tokyo the immense cost of ruling China directly. But Chiang refused to capitulate, and Japan found itself mired in a vast war of attrition instead of a short, triumphant campaign. By 1938, the Japanese army controlled much of eastern and northern China but was still unable to crush resistance. The military was divided over what to do next.
Some favored carving China into multiple puppet states. Others still hoped for a negotiated peace. In practice, Japan established several collaborationist governments, each designed to give the occupation a veneer of legitimacy. In the long term, Japan envisioned keeping Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and the rich eastern seaboard under direct or indirect control while leaving the interior weak and fragmented under puppet rulers.
The idea was never to annex all of China. It was to dominate its economy, exploit its resources, and prevent it from ever emerging as a unified rival. Japan wanted control without the cost of direct administration, a way to profit from China’s wealth without having to govern its vast population. That strategy failed.
The Chinese resistance did not break, and Japan’s resources bled away in a fight that could not be won. The frustrations of the stalled campaign eventually pushed Tokyo to gamble on war with the Western powers. In 1941, Japan turned south, toward the oil and resources of Southeast Asia. The decision to attack the British, the Americans, and the Dutch was a direct response to the strategic dead end in China.
Japan needed oil and raw materials to keep its war machine running. Seizing the resources of Southeast Asia seemed like the only way out. That gamble led directly to the Pacific War and, ultimately, to Japan’s catastrophic defeat. The story of how Japan got into a war with the Netherlands is particularly telling, because in that case it was the Dutch who declared war on Japan, not the other way around.
But the larger lesson is clear. Japan’s strategy in China was never based on a coherent long-term plan. It was a series of improvisations, driven by overconfidence, racial arrogance, and a fatal misreading of the enemy. The Japanese believed that China would do what it had done in the past, collapse after a few short, decisive defeats.
They could not imagine that the Chinese people would rally behind their government and refuse to surrender while their cities burned. Japan studied its own victories and assumed they would repeat themselves. It never studied its enemies deeply enough to understand the force it was up against. The result was a brutal, endless war that Japan could not win, a war that drained its strength and pushed it toward a broader, even more disastrous conflict.
The puppet states crumbled, the occupation proved hollow, and the imperial dream of dominating China ended not in triumph but in ruin.
