Leseprobe

177 and was the first of the great powers to make equitable relations with the government in Beijing. And in the mid-1920s, the anti-imperialist movement was a further great blow to the dominance of the Western powers in China. But despite the efforts of the Nationalist regime to amend them, the Unequal Treaty remained valid for the time being, even if its provisions were more and more difficult to implement in practice. 3 Furthermore, China saw itself confronted with the greatest assault of imperialism ever with the advance of Japan starting at the end of the 1920s. But finally it was not the direct military conflict with its eastern neighbour that led to the reversal in China’s international position, but rather changes in the overall global strategic situation. The shift of the overall strategic situation and the end of the unequal treaties The war that is still called the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance today ( Kang Ri zhanzheng ), can be broken down into three phases. The first phase, from 18 September 1931 until mid-1937, was a limited war, during which Japan under a pretext occupied Manchuria and in the following years other parts of Northern China, establishing collabora- tive regimes, above all the state of Manchukuo (1932). Furthermore, the Japanese Navy attacked Shanghai. Anti-Japanese resistance emanated from local military forces, whereas the National Govern- ment negotiated with Japan, which resulted in an armistice at the end of May 1933. China received political and diplomatic support from the League of Nations, whose commission to Manchuria, led by Lord Victor Bulwer-Lytton, recommended the restoration of the status quo, just as non-member USA did. But these demands were ignored in Tokyo, and the Japanese government dispensed with such tedious objections by withdrawing from the League of Nations in the spring of 1933. 4 The war entered its second phase with the exchange of fire between Chinese and Japanese troops on the Lugou or Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing on 7 July 1937. The occasion was trivial, but it occurred at a time when the situation in China and on the global political stage had fundamentally changed. In view of the increas- ingly aggressive position of the Third Reich and Italy, Stalin oriented Soviet policy towards entry into the League of Nations starting in 1934 as well as towards the support of anti-fascist people’s fronts including bourgeois political parties. In the course of this reorientation, he also demanded that the Chinese Communists, who had just suffered heavy losses in their flight from Nationalist troops to North- western China on the “Long March”, make peace with Chiang Kai-shek. 5 His imprisonment in Xi’an in December of 1936 by Zhang Xueliang, the former warlord of Manchuria who had fled the Japanese, paved the way for the formation of an anti-Japanese united front. This political and military reversal was reinforced by the pressure of