GCSE ESSAY- The Manchurian Dispute

The first 200 words of this essay...

Why did the League of Nations fail to act upon the Manchurian dispute?

When Japan attacked the North Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931, the League did little to punish them for their act. The League acted weakly, using the Lytton Committee to buy themselves time. The Lytton Committee spent 11 months in Manchuria, gathering evidence on what had happened, and their only prescribed course of action was to criticise both Japan and China for the incident.

The Japanese were resentful of the European powers from the treaty of Versailles, where they felt their demands for rewards were ignored, even though they were a victorious power. This resentment, coupled with the armament that was going on in Japan at the time, where the army had a huge influence diplomatically, meant that Britain and France felt threatened by hostile Japan, and did not want to upset them by standing against them. Japan was also on the League council, so of course the Japanese representative would not agree to any League action on Japan, a problem the League encountered later in dealing with Italian invasion of Abyssinia.

At this time the whole world was going through