426 WAR AND REVOLUTION east-central China,and Taiwan-all controlled in varying degrees b Japan-as well as the Guomindang regime in Chongqing,and the Com munist base in Shaanxi.In addition,much of Shanxi province,especially around Taiyuan,remained in the hands of the warlord ruler Yan Xishan Japanese-occupied Canton constituted yet another separate zone of author ity,as did the great far-western expanse of Xinjiang.Here the predomi nantly Muslim population was controlled by an autonomous military governor who nervously sought aid and sponsorship first from Soviet Russ and then from the Guomindang.Tibet,too,had reasserted its independence Although China since 1911 had grown used to political fragmentatio and civil war,this partial reconsolidation into large units,many as big as bigger than whole countries,seemed to renew the threat that the pressure of foreign imperialism had posed in the late nineteenth century-that Chin might end up permanently divided.The solidification of such a group new states would return China to the situation that had prevailed before the Qin conquests of 221 B.C.,during the so-called Warring States period when ten major regimes controlled the country among them;or it migh bring a recurrence of the shifting patterns of authority and alliances tha typified China's history from the third to sixth century A.D.,and again from the tenth to the thirteenth. The fall of Wuhan in late 1938 marked the end of Japan's first concerted assault on China,for the Japanese War Ministry's carlier plan to hold ceiling of 250,000 Japanese combat troops in China had not proved feasible and there was now a danger of becoming seriously overextended.Japan's goal in its China operations was to win an extensive base of natural resources that would fuel further industrial development-both for civil and militar purposes-and to expand the"new order"in Asia under Japan's cultural leadership,a dream of the Japanese for forty years.There was no intentio of tying down the cream of the Japanese army in a protracted occupation of all China;rather the plan was to develop an interlocking network of puppet regimes,on the model of Manchukuo,that would give Japan pref erential economic treatment,be staunchly anti-Communist,and provide the puppet troops that would garrison and patrol their own territories in Japan's name.Japanese planners also hoped that by fragmenting China's economy further,and especially by weakening the comparatively successful fabi cur- rency that the Nationalists had set up in reforms of 1935,Japan would undermine what little was left of China's financial stability.Without a decent financial base,the Chongqing regime would surely capitulate. Japan's original puppet state,Manchukuo,which had been formed between 1932 and 1934,underwent rapid industrial and military expansion