 Complete the following phrase:  The Kuomintang KMT party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese Communist Party allies and new regional warlords. In 1931, an increasingly militaristic Empire of Japan, which had long sought influence in China as the first step of what its government saw as the countrys right to rule Asia, staged the Mukden Incident as a pretext to 