Second Sino-Japanese War

The causes

Japanese expansion in Asia accelerated after the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which led to the creation of Manchukuo, a state under Japanese control. Japan, where the military weighed heavily on politics, wanted to control the resources and markets of northern China. On July 7, 1937, a military incident near the Marco Polo Bridge, southwest of Beijing, gave the signal for a general offensive.

Japan, poor in coal, iron and oil, depended on imports and wanted an economic sphere on the continent. The world crisis of 1929 struck its economy hard, and officers of the Kwantung Army, stationed in Manchuria, acted without waiting for orders from Tokyo: the Mukden Incident, on 18 September 1931, served them as a pretext for occupying north-eastern China. In China, the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek had unified a large part of the country in 1928, but it first wanted to eliminate the Communists, which delayed resistance. Chinese national feeling, nourished by the humiliations of the 19th century and by the May Fourth Movement of 1919, grew stronger in the face of Japan.

The course of the war

As early as the summer of 1937, fighting spread to Shanghai, then into the interior of the country. In December 1937, Japanese troops took Nanjing, the Nationalist capital at the time, and carried out a massacre of civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers; historians have established these crimes, although the death toll remains debated.

In 1938, the Japanese took Wuhan, and the Chinese government retreated to Chongqing, in the west of the country. The war bogged down: Japan held the cities and the lines of communication, while Chinese forces waged guerrilla warfare in the countryside. The Allies helped China, the United States via the Burma Road and by an airlift over the Himalayas, known as the Hump, and the USSR through military aid. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, the war became part of the world conflict, and Japan signed its surrender on September 2, 1945.

In 1938, Chinese forces won at Taierzhuang, in Shandong, one of the rare victories against the Japanese army. But in June, to slow the Japanese advance toward Wuhan, the Nationalist authorities breached the dikes of the Yellow River: the waters flooded vast regions, and many civilians died. This decision, still debated by historians, illustrates the brutality of a war in which populations were caught between the armies. Japan, for its part, pursued its offensives against the large cities and the railways.

In 1940, the Japanese installed at Nanjing a puppet government led by Wang Jingwei, a nationalist dissident. Chinese forces held Changsha in 1939, facing a Japanese offensive. In 1944, Operation Ichi-Go, the largest Japanese offensive of the war in China, conquered large parts of central and southern China, including several American air bases. It shows that the Japanese, while holding the cities and the main routes, never subdued the hinterland. Cities and railways remained targets, and the occupation weighed heavily on the peasants.

For civilians, the war was a succession of displacements, famines and repression. The Japanese army pursued a harsh policy against the countryside, and Unit 731, based near Harbin in Manchuria, carried out medical experiments on prisoners. On the Allied side, American aircraft supplied China from India over the Himalayas by the air route known as the Hump, whose pilots faced very difficult weather conditions. Chinese soldiers, poorly equipped, often fought without modern weapons. Despite these difficulties, the Chinese armies continued to defend the country for eight years.

The consequences

The war left China devastated and its people lastingly marked. The United Front fell apart with the Japanese defeat: the civil war resumed between nationalists and communists, and ended in 1949. In Japan, the militarist regime disappeared and the country was placed under American occupation; Japanese officials were tried for war crimes, notably in Tokyo.

Historians debate the very beginning of the war: some date its start to 1931, with the invasion of Manchuria, others to 1937. In Japan, the place of this war in national memory remains sensitive, particularly regarding the crimes committed in China, and school textbooks regularly become the subject of controversy. China waived war reparations in the 1972 Joint Communiqué, which normalised relations with Japan, but questions of individual compensation remain open. In China, Victory Day, 3 September, has been a national commemoration since 2014.

Timeline

1. 1937Marco Polo Bridge incident near Beijing, start of the full-scale war
2. 1937Capture of Nanjing and massacre of Chinese civilians and soldiers
3. 1938Fall of Wuhan; the Chinese government retreats to Chongqing
4. 1941Pearl Harbor brings the war into World War II
5. 1945Japan's surrender, signed on September 2

Key figures

• Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Chinese Nationalist government
• Mao Zedong, head of the Communist Party, allied against Japan in the United Front
• Hirohito, emperor of Japan during the war, who announced the surrender
• Joseph Stilwell, American general, chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek