This chapter traces how the Stimson Doctrine helped recast Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet as “Chinese territory,” branding Japan an aggressor and forcing its withdrawal from the League of Nations. It then follows how postwar U.S. policy kept endorsing China’s territorial claims while containing Japan, and explains why Trump’s declaration that “Taiwan is not part of China” marked the first open U.S. repudiation of Beijing’s historical narrative.

Trump’s First Rebuff: “Taiwan Is Not Part of China”
October 31, 2018

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
And what was the final outcome of that?
They had despised the Chinese as trash, yet on the eve of the Pacific War they flattered and used them to an unprecedented degree.
They egged Chiang Kai-shek on to fight Japan, and as a result Japan had to keep 40 of its 51 divisions bogged down in China.
Only 11 divisions were left to fight Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands in the Pacific.
The reward for that came in 1932 in the form of the “Stimson Doctrine.”
Japan’s lifeline was Manchuria.
Traditionally, China’s territory had been the area inside the Great Wall, yet it was Stimson who declared that Manchuria was also Chinese territory.
After the Xinhai Revolution, the con man Sun Yat-sen proclaimed the slogan of “Harmony of the Five Races,” saying, “We will establish the Republic of China and take care of the Manchu dynasty.”
In other words, it was a baseless tall tale that he wanted to inherit in its entirety the Qing empire’s domain—Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet included.
No one took him seriously.
Then Stimson appeared on the scene and dragged out Sun Yat-sen’s “last will.”
International opinion was anti-Japanese, so they went along with it.
As a result, Manchuria was deemed Chinese territory, Japan was accused of having arbitrarily invaded Chinese land, and thus was said to be violating the Kellogg–Briand Pact and the Nine-Power Treaty; Japan was left with no ground to stand on.
Because of Stimson’s pronouncement, Japan was even forced to withdraw from the League of Nations.
It ended up with the United States in effect guaranteeing that China had sovereignty over Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
Kawazoe: Of course, the People’s Republic of China did not yet exist, so this was with respect to Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China government.
Takayama: Right.
In any case, thanks to Stimson, China was now able to say that even the lands beyond the Great Wall, the “barbarian” territories, were theirs.
After the war, the United States continued to recognize China’s territorial holdings, partly as a way to keep Japan’s revival in check.
And as China grew larger, it began to collect hefty “recognition fees” as well.
Yet today’s China swaggers around saying, “The fact that we hold Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet is not thanks to America; they have always been ours,” and Trump, for the first time, pushed back and said, “Don’t talk nonsense.”
His first declaration of invalidation was the assertion that “Taiwan does not belong to China.”
To be continued in the next installment.