Defeat themselves is what they did

“On September 24 [1937] the Japanese took Paoting, Sung Che-yuan’s headquarters on the Peking-Hankow Railway. The fever of savagery bred by their own campaigns burst out in a week’s rampage of murder, rape and pillage, by 30,000 soldiers. A self-defeating ferocity accompanied them like a hyena of conquest, growing more ravenous by what it fed on. The Japanese knew that a hostile China must ultimately defeat their aim to become leader of Asia. Throughout their years on the mainland nothing so maddened them as the constant reappearance of ‘anti-Japanese’ sentiment. Annually they insisted on the necessity of forcing China to be ‘sincerely’ cooperative. Intending to attach China, they found themselves forced to conquer, arousing increasing hatred with each advance and employing increasing brutality in response. At Paoting in addition to physical terrorism they burned all the schoolbooks in week-long bonfires as well as the library and laboratory equipment of the Hopei Medical College. A decade’s records of crop statistics at the Agriculture Institute, the basis of its program for improved farming methods, were also deliberately destroyed.” – Barbara Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China