Did Japan have any chance of destroying chinese resistance during the second Sino-Japanese war or were they doomed to lose the war? If that is impossible, could a more modetate government come to power through coup d'etat in Japan and offer peace to the chinese with modetate demands/white peace?
Could Japan conquer China?
- Thread starter Gwachiko
- Start date
If you kill resistence left and right you'll reach the point sooner or later where no more resistence can happen due to a lack of people to resist. Had there been no intervention by the West or Japan being at war anywhere else that would have been the inevitable outcome.
But would the west stand idly by while Japan basically pulls a Nanking on all of China? If not out of humanitarian concern, then surely out of economic and geopolitical interest, they wouldn’t want an entirely subjugated China to any one power, much less to one aggressively expanding like Japan.
Apart from that, the Japanese War Machine run on oil, and there wasn’t much of t. Sooner rather than later, Japan would run out, and would be unable to conduct a war in a China, unless they invaded places where there was a lot, at which point you come into conflict with European colonial powers in Asia and eventually the US, essentially getting OTL.
But even then, would it really be in Japan’s interest to try to subjugate and pacify such a vast area, population, a fairly different civilization, when the tide of decolonization would effectively nullify all that in three, maximum four decades?
France couldn’t manage to keep he lid on Algeria, a colony that had a sizable french population, where French and Arabic were both main languages rather than Arabic, with French as the language of prestige and administration, it had a much smaller population and still it got away. Thus, I think that Japan has no chance to conquer China, and keep it for more than half a decade.
If there's even more serious action in Europe compared to OTL they just might throw China under the bus. Say a more scientifically minded and competent Germany beats the Soviet early and UK/USA have to pool all resources to that region, there's no embargo and Japan sells anything they can loot from China for hard cash to keep up the war.
There's plenty of anti colonial wars past WW2, i know that, but none of them were fought as cruelly as the Japanese/Chinese war was. Also most of those anti colonial wars had a foreign sponsor who delivered the weapons and military advisors, for example the Soviets. If China has no outside sponsor and no foreign war for Japan to fight outside of China it's pretty much screwed.
France was winning in Algeria but lacked the political will to hold on to Algeria.None of European powers were forced in a Dunkirk type withdraw from the colonies but rather loss the political will to keep fighting and negotiated with the independence movements.
I think you’d see a similar dynamic at play even in a semi-fascist State, with totalitarian characteristics like Japan. At some point some leader is going to see that the situation is untenable, the economic, political, social costs too great.
Depends on the economic cost as Japanese society at that time was willing to accept large casualties
They were wildly successfully in otl capturing large portions of China
Partial Capture, still the chances for full fledge vassalization were not good, i think japan would have exploded even with not pearl harbor by 1944... 1945...still depends, plus their strategy make them zero friends in china(Nanking)
They still managed to capture territory will into 1944 in otl
They had collaborationist army of half a million
Japanese had same problem like Germans during operation Barbarossa
a imbalance in Fighting numbers, a German had to Kill 2 to 4 Soviets in order to survive
one Japanese Soldier had to kill 5 to 10 Chinese* who are determined to kill him
*=Based on assumption there were 500 million Chinese during Japanese occupation of China
The golden rules for invasion
1. check populations number
2. check military strengt
3. check the Economic output
IF those number in disadvantage for Invader nation, please cancel operation...
a imbalance in Fighting numbers, a German had to Kill 2 to 4 Soviets in order to survive
one Japanese Soldier had to kill 5 to 10 Chinese* who are determined to kill him
*=Based on assumption there were 500 million Chinese during Japanese occupation of China
The golden rules for invasion
1. check populations number
2. check military strengt
3. check the Economic output
IF those number in disadvantage for Invader nation, please cancel operation...
Japan dwarfs China in both economic output and in quality of troops not to mention all the troops used in the pacific and south-east Asia are now available for use in China.
I still don't get why Japan wanted to conquer China. They had very little natural resources or manufacturing base to take over. As a consumer market they were probably so-so as they were not a wealthy nation. When you step back and look at the reasons to go to war there just doesn't seem to be much sense in them going that direction. Particularly if you look at the cost/gain ratio; i just don't see the logic. From a land standpoint they already had Korea and Manchuria which had more natural resources then the rest of China. Japan could have settled those areas and after many generations made that land their own while displacing the native populations. Siam would have been a much better target then China and then of course the Dutch East Indies were resource rich.
Maybe one of you can explain why China...
Maybe one of you can explain why China...
Maybe if Japan declares war on Germany and sent ships and token man power and planes they could earn the favor of Britain and France, so long as they stay away from the Western colonies.
In a country of what some ~500 million? Ichi Go only succeeded in overextending the already stretched IJA forces committing them to hold more land in the face of Chinese resistance.
Japan could not continue to prosecute the war indefinitely continuing Western sanctions and the lack of hard currency necessary to purchase the material to continue the war would have led to the Japanese war effort eventually to a halt one way or another
Now please point me to a direction which states that the Imperial Japanese Army was gonna start trying to kill a hundred million Chinese
The population of Algeria was only around 20% that of metropolitan France. The Chinese population outnumbered the Japanese one by over 200 million.
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White Lightning
Banned
If you don't think the Western powers would have stood idly by as Japan a systematic genocide of China, you must have missed the Holocaust.
China has very few natural resources? Chinese manufacturing wasn't quite as developed as Japan's at that point, sure, but China's far from resource poor. Hell, according to The Mineral Yearbook, 1940, they produced 25% of the world's tungsten from 1936-1945! That's in addition to vast, fertile farmlands and huge mineral deposits (coal, zinc, gold, etc., though not sure if the extent of those deposits were known at the time), which would've made China
, if successfully subdued,
a massive boon for the Japanese Empire. There's also the security factor, in that Japan had a lead on China at the time but Japanese aggression towards China and the seizure of Manchuria had soured relations between the two such that reconciliation would've been difficult, if not altogether impossible, with both countries' leaderships at the time in mind. The Chinese were humiliated and fractured due to defeats to the Japanese (mind, it wasn't just Korea or Taiwan or Manchuria, there was the rest of northern China and Mongolia at risk) while the Japanese were caught on war fever and had proved themselves to be an aggressor. Japan had been funding warlords, exploiting divisions in the Chinese leadership, and generally trying to render China impotent, no longer a threat to Japanese hegemony. If war were to happen over dominance of East Asia, it was in Japan's interest to start it when China was still weak and to break them as a power altogether, lest China consolidate properly, modernise more effectively, and begin pressing back against Japanese aggression.
And there's the prestige/war fever to consider. China had been considered the center of civilisation for thousands of years and had looked down on the Japanese for most of that period. Taking over China was a dream from back when Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi were in charge and the latter launched his invasion of Korea. After winning so many times against and so many concessions from China and with the economic depravations of the Great Depression beating down the Japanese economy, conquest seemed the natural thing to do for Japanese militarists, who had a tendency to assassinate politicians opposed to constant conquest and war.
