Second Sino-Japanese War

Based on Wikipedia: Second Sino-Japanese War

Twenty million people died. That number is almost impossible to comprehend—roughly equivalent to the entire population of Australia today, or every person living in New York State wiped from existence. Most of them were Chinese civilians. And yet, in Western memory, this war barely registers as a footnote, overshadowed by the European theater and the Pacific island-hopping campaigns that followed Pearl Harbor.

The Second Sino-Japanese War, which raged from 1937 to 1945, was the largest conflict ever fought on Asian soil. It is sometimes called the beginning of World War Two in Asia, predating the German invasion of Poland by more than two years. For China, it represents a national trauma so profound that the country's official name for it—the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression—carries the weight of that suffering in every syllable.

The Long Fuse

To understand how this catastrophe unfolded, we need to rewind to 1894, when a declining Qing dynasty China lost a war to an ascendant Japan. The Treaty of Shimonoseki that ended that conflict forced China to cede Taiwan and recognize Korean independence—which Japan promptly exploited to establish its own influence over the peninsula. Japan had modernized rapidly following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, transforming from a feudal society into an industrial power in barely a generation. China, meanwhile, was crumbling from within.

The Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, replaced by a republic that existed more on paper than in practice. A military strongman named Yuan Shikai maneuvered himself into the presidency, then attempted to crown himself emperor. The backlash was swift and fatal to his ambitions. Yuan died in 1916, and China fractured into a patchwork of territories controlled by competing warlords, each commanding their own armies and extracting taxes from their domains.

Japan watched this chaos with predatory interest.

In 1915, while Europe was consumed by World War One, Japan presented China with the Twenty-One Demands—an ultimatum that would have effectively reduced China to a Japanese protectorate. Yuan Shikai, desperate to maintain his grip on power, accepted most of them. After the Great War ended, Japan inherited Germany's sphere of influence in China's Shandong province, sparking nationwide protests that became known as the May Fourth Movement. A generation of Chinese intellectuals and students awoke to nationalism, determined that their country would never again be carved up by foreign powers.

Two Civil Wars at Once

By the mid-1920s, a Nationalist party called the Kuomintang, based in southern China, launched a military campaign to reunify the country. Their army, trained with Soviet assistance, swept northward in what became known as the Northern Expedition. Leading this force was a general named Chiang Kai-shek, who would become one of the most consequential figures in modern Chinese history.

But the Kuomintang was not the only revolutionary movement in China. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921 with Soviet backing, had initially cooperated with the Nationalists. In 1927, that alliance shattered in blood. Chiang Kai-shek turned on his Communist allies in Shanghai, orchestrating a massacre that killed thousands. The survivors fled to the countryside, where a young revolutionary named Mao Zedong began building a peasant army in the mountains.

China now had two civil wars running simultaneously: the Nationalists fighting the warlords, and the Nationalists fighting the Communists. Japan exploited both.

Manchuria Falls

Manchuria—the vast, resource-rich region in China's northeast—had long been central to Japanese strategic thinking. It offered coal, iron, and agricultural land. It provided a buffer against the Soviet Union to the north. And it was defended by Chinese forces that had just been humiliated by the Soviet Red Army in a 1929 border clash.

Japanese military officers stationed in Manchuria noticed this weakness. They decided to act without waiting for permission from Tokyo.

On September 18, 1931, a bomb exploded on the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway near the city of Mukden. The damage was so slight that a train passed over the tracks minutes later. But the explosion served its purpose. Japanese officers claimed that Chinese soldiers had sabotaged the railway—a complete fabrication—and used this as justification to occupy all of Manchuria within months.

This was the Mukden Incident, a false flag operation that would become a template for aggressive wars to come. Japan established a puppet state called Manchukuo, installing the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as a figurehead ruler with no real power. The League of Nations condemned the invasion but did nothing meaningful to stop it. Japan simply withdrew from the League.

Some historians mark September 18, 1931 as the true beginning of World War Two—six years before the Marco Polo Bridge and eight years before Hitler invaded Poland.

Chiang's Fatal Calculation

Chiang Kai-shek faced an impossible dilemma. His Nationalist government controlled only a portion of China. Warlords still dominated many provinces. The Communists were building strength in the interior. And now Japan had seized Manchuria and was probing deeper into northern China.

Chiang made a fateful choice. He decided that the Communists posed a greater threat than the Japanese. His policy became known by a slogan: "First internal pacification, then external resistance." In practical terms, this meant launching encirclement campaigns against Communist base areas while largely avoiding confrontation with Japan.

By late 1933, Chiang's strategy seemed to be working. Nationalist armies had surrounded the main Communist stronghold in Jiangxi province, choking off supplies and tightening the noose. The Communists faced annihilation.

Their response was one of the most remarkable retreats in military history.

Beginning in October 1934, roughly 100,000 Communist soldiers and their supporters broke through Nationalist lines and began walking. They would walk for an entire year, covering some 6,000 miles through mountains, swamps, and hostile territory. They crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges. They fought dozens of battles against Nationalist forces and hostile warlords. By the time they reached the remote caves of Yan'an in Shaanxi province, barely 10,000 remained.

This was the Long March, and it should have destroyed the Communist movement. Instead, it forged a hardened core of survivors and transformed Mao Zedong into their undisputed leader.

The Xi'an Incident

By 1936, many Chinese had grown frustrated with Chiang's refusal to confront Japan directly. This frustration reached its peak in December, when Chiang flew to the city of Xi'an to pressure local warlord Zhang Xueliang into continuing attacks on the Communists.

Zhang was the son of the warlord who had controlled Manchuria before the Japanese invasion. His father had been assassinated by Japanese agents in 1928. Zhang had lost his homeland to Japan and had no appetite for fighting fellow Chinese while foreign troops occupied his family's territory.

What happened next shocked the world. Zhang's soldiers kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek and held him captive. For two weeks, the fate of China hung in the balance. The Communists initially wanted Chiang executed, but Moscow—which saw Chiang as essential to resisting Japan—intervened. Stalin sent word that Chiang must live.

The compromise that emerged from Xi'an created a Second United Front: Nationalists and Communists would suspend their civil war and unite against Japan. Chiang was released. Zhang Xueliang surrendered himself to Chiang and would spend the next fifty years under house arrest—first in mainland China, then in Taiwan.

The United Front was fragile and riven with mutual suspicion. But it meant that when full-scale war came the following year, China would face Japan as something approaching a unified nation.

The Marco Polo Bridge

Southwest of Beijing, an elegant stone bridge spans the Yongding River. Built in 1189, it features 485 carved stone lions, each one unique, lining its marble balustrades. Marco Polo described it as "the finest bridge in the world" when he visited in the thirteenth century, and his name has clung to it ever since.

On the night of July 7, 1937, Japanese troops were conducting exercises near the bridge. A shot rang out. The Japanese commander reported that one of his soldiers was missing and demanded to search the nearby town of Wanping. The Chinese garrison refused. By morning, the two sides were exchanging fire.

The missing soldier, as it turned out, had simply wandered off to relieve himself and returned to his unit unharmed. But by then, the shooting had started. Local commanders on both sides attempted to negotiate a ceasefire, and briefly succeeded. Then reinforcements arrived from Tokyo with orders to escalate.

Within weeks, Japanese forces had seized Beijing and Tianjin. The eight-year total war had begun.

The Fall of Shanghai and Nanjing

Chiang Kai-shek decided to make his stand at Shanghai. Rather than let the Japanese advance south from the north, he would force them to fight for China's largest city and commercial center, drawing them into a battle where Chinese numerical superiority might offset Japanese technological advantages.

It did not work out that way.

The Battle of Shanghai lasted three months, from August to November 1937. Chinese forces fought with desperate courage but were systematically destroyed by Japanese air power, naval bombardment, and superior coordination. Japanese aircraft ruled the skies. Japanese ships controlled the coast. Some 200,000 Chinese soldiers died defending the city.

When Shanghai fell, the road to Nanjing—the Nationalist capital—lay open.

What happened next remains one of the most horrific atrocities of the twentieth century. Japanese troops entered Nanjing in December 1937 and embarked on six weeks of murder, rape, and destruction. Soldiers competed to see who could kill more prisoners with their swords. Women and girls were systematically assaulted. Entire neighborhoods were put to the torch.

Estimates of the death toll range from 40,000 to over 300,000, with the Chinese government citing 300,000 as the official figure. The exact number may never be known—the killing was too chaotic, the record-keeping too destroyed. What is certain is that the Nanjing Massacre, as it came to be known, was a war crime of staggering proportions.

The Japanese government has never fully acknowledged the extent of these atrocities. This denial remains a source of bitter tension between China and Japan to this day.

The War of Attrition

After Nanjing, the Nationalist government retreated westward, eventually establishing its wartime capital in Chongqing, a city protected by mountains and the gorges of the Yangtze River. Japan captured the major coastal cities and much of eastern China, but controlling this vast territory proved far more difficult than conquering it.

By 1939, the war had settled into a brutal stalemate.

The Japanese could not force a decisive victory. They launched offensive after offensive but could never quite deliver a knockout blow. Chinese forces, though outgunned, traded space for time, retreating into the interior where Japanese supply lines grew impossibly stretched. Meanwhile, Communist guerrillas operating behind Japanese lines launched constant harassment operations, blowing up railway lines, ambushing convoys, and making occupation a nightmare.

The most famous of these guerrilla operations was the Hundred Regiments Offensive of August 1940, when Communist forces coordinated attacks across a wide swath of Japanese-occupied territory. The offensive demonstrated that the Communists had grown into a serious military force. It also drew ferocious Japanese retaliation against villages suspected of supporting the guerrillas.

The Nationalists, meanwhile, were bleeding. Soviet military aid—aircraft, tanks, artillery, and advisors—had sustained the Chinese war effort since 1937. In April 1941, that aid abruptly ceased when the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact with Japan, freeing Moscow to focus on the growing threat from Nazi Germany.

China was increasingly alone.

Pearl Harbor Changes Everything

On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States declared war on Japan the following day. Suddenly, China's lonely struggle became part of a global conflict.

American aid began flowing under the Lend-Lease program. When Japanese forces cut the Burma Road—the overland supply route from British Burma to China—American pilots began flying supplies over the Himalayas themselves. This route, known as "the Hump," crossed some of the world's highest and most treacherous mountain terrain. More than 600 aircraft and 1,000 crew members were lost to the unforgiving peaks.

American General Joseph Stilwell was dispatched to China as Chiang Kai-shek's chief of staff, with orders to coordinate the Allied war effort in the China-Burma-India theater. His assignment produced one of the war's most dysfunctional command relationships. Stilwell, cantankerous and brutally honest, clashed constantly with Chiang, whom he privately referred to as "Peanut." Stilwell wanted to reform the Chinese army and launch offensives against the Japanese. Chiang wanted to preserve his forces for the postwar struggle against the Communists.

Both men had a point. Stilwell was right that the Chinese military was plagued by corruption, incompetent leadership, and byzantine politics. Chiang was right that his primary concern had to be political survival. Their inability to work together hobbled the Allied effort in China.

Operation Ichi-Go

In 1944, with American bombers beginning to strike the Japanese home islands from bases in China, Japan launched its largest offensive of the war. Operation Ichi-Go aimed to destroy Chinese armies, capture the airbases, and create a continuous land corridor from Manchuria to French Indochina.

The operation was a military success and a political disaster.

Japanese forces swept across Henan province and drove south into Hunan and Guangxi. Chinese armies crumbled. In some places, Chinese peasants actually attacked retreating Nationalist soldiers, so bitter had relations between the military and civilians become. The Japanese captured the airfields they sought and linked their occupied territories into a continuous line.

But the victory came too late to matter. American forces in the Pacific had already bypassed China as the main axis of advance toward Japan. The capture of the Mariana Islands in mid-1944 put American B-29 bombers within range of Tokyo without needing Chinese bases. Operation Ichi-Go consumed Japanese resources that might have been used elsewhere, for objectives that had become strategically irrelevant.

By 1945, China was launching counteroffensives. Chinese forces recaptured much of Guangxi and pushed the Japanese back in several sectors. The new Burma Road was completed, restoring overland supply routes. Victory was in sight.

The End

Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war. The formal surrender ceremony took place on September 2 aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

China emerged from the war as one of the victorious Big Four Allied powers, alongside the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. It became a founding member of the United Nations and one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, a status it retains today. All the territory Japan had seized—Manchuria, Taiwan, and the coastal cities—returned to Chinese control.

But the country was devastated. Years of war had destroyed cities, disrupted agriculture, and shattered the economy. Hyperinflation was rampant. The government's legitimacy had been eroded by corruption, military failures, and the brutality of its own troops toward Chinese civilians. And waiting in the wings were the Communists, their forces now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, battle-hardened and ideologically committed.

The Second United Front collapsed almost immediately after Japan's surrender. Within a year, full-scale civil war had resumed. By 1949, the Communists had swept the Nationalists from the mainland. Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from the gate of the Forbidden City. Chiang Kai-shek and the remnants of his government fled to Taiwan, where his Republic of China still technically exists.

The Politics of Memory

How long did the war last? The answer depends on who you ask and what political point they want to make.

For decades, the traditional Chinese view dated the war from 1937, making it an eight-year conflict. This timeline emphasized the period when the Nationalist government led organized resistance and marginalized the earlier fighting in Manchuria. In 2017, the Chinese government officially adopted a new position: the war lasted fourteen years, beginning with the Mukden Incident of 1931. This revision gives greater recognition to northeastern China's role and, not coincidentally, extends the Communist Party's claim to have resisted Japan from the very beginning.

Japanese terminology has its own complexities. When the invasion began, Tokyo called it the "China Incident"—deliberately avoiding the word "war" to prevent triggering American neutrality legislation that would have cut off vital supplies of oil and steel. Only after Pearl Harbor, when Japan was already at war with the Western powers, did it become the "Greater East Asia War."

Some Japanese historians refer to a "Fifteen-Year War" stretching from 1931 to 1945, encompassing both the China conflict and the Pacific war. The term suggests an integrated view of Japanese aggression across Asia. Contemporary Japan most commonly uses the neutral phrase "Japan-China War," though even this carries sensitivities. The older Japanese term for China, "Shina," is now considered derogatory, requiring careful paraphrase in modern discourse.

Why This History Still Matters

The wounds of this war have never fully healed. Regular diplomatic crises erupt between China and Japan over historical issues: prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted war criminals are among those honored; Japanese textbook descriptions of the invasion; disputes over the Senkaku Islands, which Japan seized in 1895.

When a Japanese politician makes comments that seem to minimize wartime atrocities, China's response is swift and fierce. Official statements invoke "the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people" and warn of consequences for those who "insist on being an enemy" of China. The language is not mere diplomatic boilerplate. It reflects genuine popular anger that has been cultivated, but did not need to be invented, by the Chinese government.

For Chinese people, the War of Resistance is not ancient history. It is living memory, passed down through families that lost grandparents to Japanese bombs or bayonets. It is the foundation of modern Chinese nationalism—the defining experience that justifies strong central government and wariness of foreign powers.

For Japan, the war is a more uncomfortable subject. Younger generations, raised on peace and prosperity, struggle to reconcile their image of modern Japan with the country that conducted the Nanjing Massacre. Some retreat into denial. Others call for clearer historical reckoning. The debate continues.

Understanding the Second Sino-Japanese War is essential to understanding East Asia today. The political arrangements that emerged from it—a Communist mainland, a separate Taiwan, American military bases in Japan, the United Nations Security Council's permanent members—still shape the region. The resentments it engendered still flare into crisis. The twenty million dead still demand to be remembered.

That stone bridge southwest of Beijing, with its 485 unique lions, still stands. It has been standing since the time of Genghis Khan. The scars of 1937 are long healed. But the war that began there continues to cast its shadow across the century.