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Foreign Policy

Mukden Incident: Japanese seizure of Manchuria begins

On September 18, 1931, an explosion on the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden was used by the Imperial Japanese Army as a pretext to launch a large-scale invasion and occupation of Manchuria.

The incident triggered a major international crisis that eroded the postwar order, worsened Sino-Japanese relations, and presented the Hoover administration with a mounting foreign-policy and security challenge without easy military or multilateral remedies.

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