Reply #13: Everyone provides good examples...

[punpirate]

... but, there are a couple of additions to make. China was badly weakened by Western forces when they used the Boxer Rebellion as an excuse to weaken the strength of the empress and a fairly strong central government. From that point on, the country effectively broke into warlords' fiefdoms, so it can't be thought of, through the 1910-1937 period, as the more unified country that it is today.

The Japanese ruthlessly exploited that fracturing by doing something like what Hitler had done to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland--Blitzkrieg. Their equivalent was known as the Rape of Nanking. Nanking at the time was the capitol city of China, and the Japanese invaded with superior weapons and tactics and executed a four-month-long reign of terror against Nanking during 1937-1938, in which 370,000 civilians and many prisoners of war were systematically butchered. That campaign enabled them to effectively control much of the country, even though they were of inferior numbers.

The Rape of Nanking was one of the most horrific periods in the pre-WWII period.