Brought over to carry out the rapidly expanding activities of Mantetsu, the Japanese civilian population of Manchuria grew rapidly from 16,612 in 1906 to 233,749 in 1930.22 Together with their dependents, Mantetsu employees accounted for about a third of this population; a large fraction of the rest were involved in commercial operations indirectly dependent on Mantetsu. Indeed, everyone's livelihood was reliant on the continuation of Mantetsu activities, just as company services—transportation, housing, sewage, electricity, entertainment, and much more—were an omnipresent feature of expatriate life in Manchuria.23
Mantetsu gave to the Japanese civilian population a predominantly elite, overwhelmingly urban cast. After briefly experimenting with importing unskilled labor from Japan, the company abandoned higher-priced Japanese workers in favor of the economies of Chinese labor. This meant that Mantetsu's Japanese work force—grown from 10,754 in 1910 to 21,824 in 1930—was of an exclusively elite character: it was an aristocracy of skilled laborers, white-collar workers, professionals, managers, and administrators.24 The private commercial and manufacturing sector that sprouted from Mantetsu's foundations did not alter the sociological balance in the Japanese community. The private sector divided into two groups, one of giant firms like the Mitsui Trading Company, the Yokohama Specie Bank, and the
Like the memories of sacrifice on the battlefield and evocations of pride in service to the Kwantung Army, participation in the economic project in Manchuria created fertile ground for the imperial imagination, generating visions of colonial privilege and cosmopolitanism. In the strategic imperatives of the Kwantung Army, “managing Manchuria” meant quelling civil unrest and manipulating the warlords. In the economic mission of Mantetsu, it signified managing the soybean trade, tending to company investments, servicing the Japanese community, and controlling Chinese society. Such was the apprehension of Mansh keiei on the eve of the Manchurian Incident—the product of an empire built to the strategic and economic specifications of the Kwantung Army and Mantetsu.
After eighty years of experience with the diplomacy of imperialism, two imperial wars, and a thirty-five-year-old colonial empire, Japan had at its disposal a sophisticated understanding of international law, an army practiced in colonial warfare, and a seasoned colonial bureaucracy. This represented the overall accumulation of Japanese imperial capital in 1931. In Manchuria itself, twenty-five years of investment had produced the well-entrenched sphere of influence that spread out from the colonial core in the Kwantung Leased Territory, anchored by the multifarious investments of Mantetsu and guarded by the Kwantung Army. A quarter of a million Japanese lived in this partially informal empire; many more had come once and returned home. Yet compared with the efforts that followed, all this would seem inconsequential—a short preamble to the extraordinary history of Manchukuo. Something changed in 1931, and with this change empire building took on a new urgency, a new audacity, and a new vision.
THE CHALLENGE OF CHINESE NATIONALISM
The immediate forces behind Japan's shift in gears emerged out of the breakdown, in the late 1920s, of the system of imperialist diplomacy in China. On the Chinese political front, the character of the civil war changed as the corrosive warlord conflicts gave way to a struggle between nascent Nationalist and Communist organizations to mobilize popular support and lead the unification of the country, with critical implications for foreign powers. Republican China's first modern political party, the Nationalist party, or Guomindang, was originally organized in 1912 by anti-Manchu revolutionaries associated with Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen). After moving through a series of reorganizations, the Guomindang fell under the leadership of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) in the 1920s and expanded rapidly. By 1926 it boasted a powerful national organization and an army of 85,000 troops. The Chinese Communist party also grew to power in the turbulent years of the twenties. Formed in 1921 with advisers, money, and arms from the Soviet Union (and, initially, a political alliance with the Nationalists), the Communist party began to organize workers and students in large numbers. By late 1925, Chinese Communist party membership reached 20,000.26
Both the Nationalists and the Communists represented a new form of mass mobilization whose popular strength was directed first at unloosing the political grip of the warlords. Their challenge to the regional military rulers culminated in the Northern Expedition of 1926–1928. Setting off from Guangzhou in the south, Jiang Jieshi led his army north to Beijing, driving some warlords into retreat and absorbing others into his swelling forces along the way. Uniting the country under the single, centralized political authority of the Guomindang, Jiang's Northern Expedition briefly ended the era of political fragmentation and chaos. Yet soon after unification, the Nationalist-Communist alliance unraveled, leading to the outbreak of a new sort of civil war. The Nationalists emerged as the clear victors in the first phase of conflict. Jiang's bloody surprise attack on Communist organizations in Shanghai in April 1927 and the suppression of Communist-organized “Autumn harvest” insurrections the following fall decimated the Communist movement. Their scattered forces retreated into the hills of the southeast where, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the peasant-based organization of the People's Liberation Army took shape and developed its strategies of guerrilla warfare. The Communists used these strategies with growing effect, challenging the Nationalist hold over a politically unified China.
Both the Nationalists and the Communists rode to power on the rising tide of anti-imperialist nationalism. The inception of the Chinese Nationalist movement is usually dated from the May Fourth Movement of 1919. After witnessing their own officials at the Paris Peace Conference sell out the former German holdings in Shandong to the interests of Japanese imperialism, enraged students organized a nationwide series of demonstrations. From that point on anti-imperialist protests became an increasingly common occurrence in Shanghai, Hankou, and other foreign centers of manufacture and trade. Merchants and workers joined with students to boycott and strike against foreign enterprises. The protesters frequently singled out British and Japanese firms, since these two nations dominated foreign economic influence in China. Both countries were divided over how to best respond to the Nationalist challenge, flip-flopping from military suppression to appeasement and back again. Coordinated imperialist action was the casualty to such confusion. Thus when the British used force to suppress protest in May and June of 1925, Japanese officials adopted a conciliatory attitude, urging cotton manufacturers to compromise with strikers. Later, when British policy makers decided to back Jiang's moderation against Communist radicalism, their loans and diplomatic support contrasted sharply with Japan's military expeditions to Shandong in 1927 and 1928. What was true for Britain and Japan was equally certain for the other foreign interests in China. Individual national interests overrode advantages of collective action, as bilateral negotiations swept aside the cooperative diplomacy prescribed by the Washington Conference.
In 1929, the collapse of the American stock market and ensuing shock wave of global depression dealt the interimperialist alliance another pro-found blow. All parties responded to the economic crisis with economic nationalism. As they sought to barricade their own interests against any competitors, the imperatives of economic survival seemed to leave less and less room for compromise. To Japanese policy makers this meant sealing off their extensive investments in Manchuria from the rest of China, for special steps seemed necessary to secure a sphere of interest from the forces of Chinese nationalism.
In