ABSTRACT
It is often said that the Second World War began in China in 1931. And that the global rise of fascism first blossomed into external aggression when Japan attacked China; then the tide of war spread to Europe and Africa, to Abyssinia and Spain, until Hitler unleashed the Second World War by marching into Poland in 1939. Undeniably there was some interdependence of European and Asian events in the 1930s. Britain and the US were in a sense sandwiched between conflicts on the European continent and eastern Asia, with vast interests bound up in the future of both worlds, West and East. But to view the earlier history of eastern Asia from the point of view of the European war of 1939 is to see that history from a Western focus, and thus to distort it. The problems of eastern Asia were coming to a head irrespective of the rise of fascism and Nazism. The problems of Europe, too, had independent roots.
