By 1940-1941 Japan had attained her war aim:  China was no longer a dangerous adversary.  She was still able to engage in small-scale fighting, but could no longer secure any decisive result.  Puppet governments were set up in Peking, Canton, and Nanking, and the Japanese waited for these governments gradually to induce supporters of Chiang Kai-shek to come over to their side.  Most was expected of Wang Ching-wei, who headed the new Nanking government.  He was one of the oldest followers of Sun Yat-sen, and was regarded as a democrat.  In 1925, after Sun Yat-sen’s death, he had been for a time the head of the Nanking government, and for a short time in 1930 he had led a government in Peking that was opposed to Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship.  Beyond any question Wang still had many followers, including some in the highest circles at Chungking, men of eastern China who considered that collaboration with Japan, especially in the economic field, offered good prospects.  Japan paid lip service to this policy:  there was talk of sister peoples, which could help each other and supply each other’s needs.  There was propaganda for a new “Greater East Asian” philosophy, Wang-tao, in accordance with which all the peoples of the East could live together in peace under a thinly disguised dictatorship.  What actually happened was that everywhere Japanese capitalists established themselves in the former Chinese industrial plants, bought up land and securities, and exploited the country for the conduct of their war.

After the great initial successes of Hitlerite Germany in 1939-1941, Japan became convinced that the time had come for a decisive blow against the positions of the Western European powers and the United States in the Far East.  Lightning blows were struck at Hong Kong and Singapore, at French Indo-China, and at the Netherlands East Indies.  The American navy seemed to have been eliminated by the attack on Pearl Harbour, and one group of islands after another fell into the hands of the Japanese.  Japan was at the gates of India and Australia.  Russia was carrying on a desperate defensive struggle against the Axis, and there was no reason to expect any intervention from her in the Far East.  Greater East Asia seemed assured against every danger.

The situation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chungking government seemed hopeless.  Even the Burma Road was cut, and supplies could only be sent by air; there was shortage of everything.  With immense energy small industries were begun all over western China, often organized as co-operatives; roads and railways were built—­but with such resources would it ever be possible to throw the Japanese into the sea?  Everything depended on holding out until a new page was turned in Europe.  Infinitely slow seemed the progress of the first gleams of hope—­the steady front in Burma, the reconquest of the first groups of inlands; the first bomb attacks on Japan itself.  Even in May, 1945, with the war ended in Europe, there seemed no sign of its ending in the Far East.  Then came the atom bomb, bringing the collapse of Japan; the Japanese armies receded from China, and suddenly China was free, mistress once more in her own country as she had not been for decades.