Without Chinese resistance, China would have become a Japanese colony as early as 1938. This would have allowed Japan dominance over the mainland, and would have allowed Tokyo to turn its attention to expansion in Southeast Asia even more swiftly, and with less distraction. A pacified China would also have made the invasion of British India much more plausible. Without the “China Quagmire”—a quagmire caused by the refusal of the Chinese to stop fighting—Japan’s imperial ambitions would have been much easier to fulfill.
