 The Chinese military believed it to be a fake tip planted by Japan to mislead them since only 30,000 Japanese soldiers started the first maneuver of Operation Ichigo in northern China crossing the Yellow river so the Chinese assumed it would be a local operation in northern China only.Another major factor was that the battlefront between China and Japan was static and stabilized since 1940 and continued for four years that way until Operation Ichigo in 1944 so Chiang assumed that Japan would continue the same posture and remain behind the lines in pre-1940 occupied territories of North China only bolstering the puppet Chinese government of Wang Jingwei and exploiting resources there.The Japanese had indeed acted this way for most of the 1940s from 1940–1944, with the Japanese only making a few failed weak attempts to capture China's provisional capital in Chongqing on the Yangtze river which they quickly abandoned and gave up on before 1944.