“Japan and Russia Will Divide China” (1940 Propaganda Map)

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In April of 1940, a map appeared in the Milwaukee Sentinel that reflected a somber and conjectural vision for the future of geopolitics. Designed by American political cartoonist Howard Burke, it was neither a map nor a prediction, but a warning. The United States was still not at war in World War II, yet tensions across the globe were quickening. Burke’s illustration hypothesized something that, to many readers at the time, felt chillingly plausible: that the Soviet Union and Japan might team up to divide China into zones of influence and control.

At the time, Japan had already seized Manchuria in 1931 and invaded China in 1937, establishing control over many of its coastal cities. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union too had strategic interests in Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet. Burke suggested on his map that both powers would sign a non-aggression pact and divide China between themselves, as with the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact dividing Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR.

The map illustrates huge tracts of China divided into spheres of influence. The legend comments that China, being so large and diverse, would be “impossible to conquer outright” by any single power, suggesting that division into puppet states would be the only possible scenario.

What Actually Occurred

Actually, Japan and the Soviet Union never conspired to divide China jointly. In fact, they were bitter enemies. Just a year before Burke’s map, they had clashed intensely in the undeclared Soviet-Japanese border war of 1939, particularly in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. That defeat cooled Japanese aspirations to the north and led Tokyo to turn southward instead.

As World War II raged on, Japan continued its brutal occupation of parts of China but ultimately lost the war in 1945 after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union entered the Pacific war in its final weeks, invading Manchuria and helping to drive out the Japanese military, but did not remain as a long-term occupying power in China.

Instead, China plunged into civil war between the Nationalists and Communists. By 1949, the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong had established the People’s Republic of China, and the Nationalists had retreated to Taiwan. The feared Soviet-Japanese alliance over China never materialized.

A Future No One Predicted

And whereas Burke’s 1940 map pictured China sliced and diced by outside powers, reality had other plans. The Soviet superpower disintegrated in 1991 and ceased to be a force that dominated the rest of the world. Instead, it left behind a much weakened Russia—a nuclear-armed country, but not one with world hegemony any longer.

Meanwhile, China developed from a war-shattered nation into an economic and geopolitical behemoth. It is now largely considered to be the world’s second superpower, after the United States. Ironically, modern China wields intense influence over most of the ex-Soviet nations through commerce, infrastructure investments (e.g., the Belt and Road Initiative), and regional diplomacy.

Burke’s speculative vision never came to pass. The real story of China, Japan, and Russia followed a path no map could fully chart in 1940.