Mukden Incident
A railway blast becomes the pretext to seize Manchuria
On 18 September 1931 officers of Japan's Kwantung Army blew up a stretch of the South Manchuria Railway and blamed the Chinese. The army overran Manchuria and in March 1932 set up the puppet state of Manchukuo under Puyi; in 1933 Japan left the League of Nations.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — 17 years earlier
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 13 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 8 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 16 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 17 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 12 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 3 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 2 years later
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 5 years later
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 10 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1917 October Revolution — 14 years earlier
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 2 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 5 years later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 10 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 11 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 23 years earlier
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 16 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 15 years earlier
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 8 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 1 year later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 9 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 4 years later
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 17 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 21 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 25 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 17 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 2 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 1 year earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 2 years later
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 14 years later
Oceania
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — 20 years earlier
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 19 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 5 years later
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 10 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 11 years later
Alive at the time
- Thomas Edison (aged 84)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 75)
- Marie Curie (aged 64)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 62)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 60)
- Winston Churchill (aged 57)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 53)
- Albert Einstein (aged 52)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 50)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 50)