World War II in China

World War II in China lasted from 1937 to 1945 as the Japanese Empire attempted to conquer China. It is also known as the Second Sino-Japanese War; Japan won the first one in 1895.

As Japan attacked the United States and the British Empire in December 1941, the war became a front of World War II, and a part of the larger Pacific theatre.

With at least 15 million deaths, the Chinese front was one of the most destructive of World War II.

Understand

 * See Japanese colonial empire, Chinese Revolutions and Pacific War for related information.

"最後關頭一到，我們只有犧牲到底，抗戰到底，祗有“犧牲到底”的決心，才能博得最後的勝利. 若是彷徨不定，妄自苟安，便會陷民族於萬劫不復之地. In the last juncture, we can only sacrifice everything and resist to the end. Only with the determination to sacrifice everything can we fight for ultimate victory. If (the war) is treated with hesitation and uncertainty or selfish momentary ease, this will lead our nation to a catastrophic irreversible situation."

- Chiang Kai-shek

Japan quickly won the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95 and, as a result, took over Taiwan, ended Chinese control of their former vassal state Korea, and on the Chinese mainland took over the Liaodong Peninsula, part of today's province of Liaoning.

Later Japan acquired considerable influence in Manchuria when they defeated the Russians in 1905; in particular they took over administration of the profitable Russian-built railway. Then following the end of World War I, as part of the victorious Allies, Japan gained control of the Shandong Peninsula from the defeated Germans. In 1931 they staged the Mukden Incident; Japanese troops bombed part of the railway, the attack was blamed on Chinese forces, and that gave Japan a pretext to occupy all of Manchuria, setting up a puppet state called Manchukuo.

From 1927, the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist government were often at each other's throats. They suspended fighting in 1937 after the Xi'an incident to fight Japan, but remained hostile to each other, and resumed their civil war in 1945, leading to Communist victory in 1949. See Chinese revolutions for details.

Japan invaded central China in 1937 after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, where nearby Japanese troops attacked after a request to search for an alleged missing Japanese soldier was refused by Chinese forces. Japanese forces soon managed to occupy much of eastern China, including the then-capital Nanjing. They set up a puppet state, the Wang Jingwei Regime (汪精卫政权/汪伪政权, Wāng Jīngwèi Zhèngquán/Wāng Wěi Zhèngquán) which controlled East China from 1940 to 1945, led by and named after the disillusioned former Nationalist revolutionary Wang Jingwei.

This invasion turned out to be a disaster for both sides. The Chinese were fighting an invader with far better armament and training, making do with whatever weapons their allies could send (many of them World War I surplus), enduring some spectacularly vicious oppression, and taking enormous numbers of casualties &mdash; over ten million military and civilian deaths, far more than any other nation except the Soviet Union. Some of them caused by mismanagement or scorched-earth policies by the ruling Kuomintang: a deliberate dam failure in Henan intended to slow down Japanese offensive caused 89000 direct deaths and even more deaths by disease and famine. Corruption was widespread within the Nationalist-led National Revolutionary Army, resulting in malnutrition and poor equipment among soldiers. Moreover, they were disunited; some factions of the Nationalists (Kuomintang) were sometimes more interested in fighting the Communists than in battling Japan; ex-warlord units were less trusted and received less equipment by Chiang Kai-shek's faction, despite their gallantry at war.

Despite all that, the National Revolutionary Army (run by the Nationalists with American advisors) managed to give the Japanese a remarkably hard time. Japanese planners thought they could take all of China in three months, leave a small force to hold it, and move most of their armies elsewhere. Actually, it took them three months just to take Shanghai and in eight years of fighting, 1937-1945, they never managed to take more than about half of China. The Chinese Army fought on through the entire war, often retreating but always at a cost to the enemy. Chinese guerrillas and saboteurs &mdash; Nationalist, Communist and independent &mdash; harassed the Japanese everywhere. Roughly half of the total Japanese ground forces were tied down in China throughout the war, including troops they had planned to use elsewhere. All the Allied land victories in the Pacific War were partly due to Chinese tenacity.

American, British and Dutch sanctions were imposed on Japan after the invasion of China; those, in particular restrictions on oil imports, were the main reason Japan gave for going to war with those nations. The Western powers also sent supplies to China via the Burma Road. The Soviet Union and America also sent volunteer air force units to support China, with the American one based in Yunnan renowned as the "Flying Tigers". Many overseas Chinese made significant financial contributions towards the Chinese war effort; in retaliation, the Japanese would single out the ethnic Chinese for the harshest treatment during their later occupation of much of Southeast Asia.

Chongqing
The "temporary capital" of China during World War II, after Nanjing had fallen to the Japanese. Despite numerous attempts by the Japanese to take it, Chinese resistance in the inland areas was much fiercer than the Japanese expected, and though it was heavily bombed, Chongqing managed to avoid Japanese occupation for the duration of the war.

Xi'an Incident sites
Chinese politics in the 1930s were complex. The Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were nominally in charge, but in many areas local warlords held the real power, some ethnic minority areas were de facto independent, and the Communists held other regions (see Long March). The strength of a political group was measured not mainly by how many votes it could get, but rather by how many divisions it could put in the field.

Yang Hucheng was the warlord of Shaanxi, the province whose capital is Xi'an. Chang Hsüeh-liang (Zhang Xueliang) was the "Young Marshal" whose family had ruled Manchuria. The Japanese assassinated his father (the "Old Marshal") in 1928, after he had acknowledged that Manchuria was part of China and accepted nominal subordination to Chiang. When the Japanese took over the region completely in 1931 the son retreated into central China, bringing an army.

Both generals were nominally subordinate to Chiang, and in 1936 he ordered them to attack the Communists. Instead they arrested him and held him until he agreed to co-operate with the Communists against the Japanese. Two heritage properties are administered by the Xi'an Incident Museum (西安事变纪念馆). Chiang's release was negotiated by Soong Ching-ling, widow of Sun Yat Sen and one of very few people trusted by everyone involved. Her home in Shanghai's French Concession is also a tourist attraction.

Respect
A Chinese law enacted in 2019 criminalizes the denial of or insult to officially-endorsed heroes and martyrs (i.e. veterans, perhaps also war crime survivors), which include any deviation from the official historiography. For war memorials, any act considered to be disrespectful can be prosecuted.

After the War, the Communist and Nationalist parties accuse each other for fighting the Japanese in a passive manner — the CPC blames the Kuomintang for purging their units despite of the formal alliance and guerrilla warfare gallantry, while the Kuomintang criticizes the communists collected arms to prepare themselves for the future civil war while contributed little guerrilla warfare. The topic is extremely polarizing (and very likely out of the red line in Mainland China). Visitors should try to stay neutral in case of such disputes.

Japanese civilian involvement in the war is also controversial. There were indeed Japanese POWs who served in the Communist Eighth Route Army, and Japanese anti-militarist activists operated in China to voice their opposition to the war of aggression waged by their country. Like Germans living under Nazi Germany however, most Japanese civilians' attitude is at best indifferent and at worst supportive to the war. A settler colonialist policy was also pursued by Japan in Manchukuo, which was especially painful to locals in Northeast China. Some Chinese (especially hardline nationalists) resent insufficient retribution and compensation, and believe that Japanese civilians deserved strategic bombings and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for their support towards the war.