Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War cost around 20 million lives, the vast majority of them Chinese civilians. It was the largest Asian war of the 20th century, and it reshaped the political map of the entire region in ways that still hold today. Japan called it "The China Incident" - deliberately avoiding the word "war" to prevent American embargoes under the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. China called it the War of Resistance Against Japan. The name a country gave this conflict revealed exactly what it needed the world to believe.
At the heart of this story are three forces that could never fully trust one another: an industrializing Japan driven by military expansionism, a Nationalist Chinese government fighting for survival, and a Communist movement that saw the war as an opportunity to build power. They fought the same enemy, but for deeply different reasons. And when Japan finally surrendered aboard a battleship on the 2nd of September 1945, the questions left unanswered between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong would ignite a new civil war within months.
How did a skirmish near a single bridge outside Beijing in July 1937 become a conflict that consumed millions of lives? What drove Japan to manufacture incidents, install puppet rulers, and ultimately bomb Pearl Harbor rather than withdraw from China? And how did a war that devastated China also lift it to permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council?
On the 18th of September 1931, Japanese soldiers planted a bomb on a section of the Southern Manchurian Railroad and blamed the Chinese for it. This false flag event - known as the Mukden Incident - gave Japan the pretext it had been engineering for years. Within five months, Japan had established the puppet state of Manchukuo, installing the last Emperor of China, Puyi, as its figurehead ruler.
Japan's appetite for Manchuria grew from several converging pressures. The region offered raw materials, a market for manufactured goods excluded from Western countries by Depression-era tariffs, and a buffer against the Soviet Union. Japan had held economic privileges in Manchuria since its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and military officers had grown accustomed to treating the territory as their sphere. When the Soviet Red Army defeated Chinese forces in the 1929 conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railroad, Kwantung Army officers watched carefully: they saw Chinese military weakness, and they also saw a Red Army that was only growing stronger. By 1930, they believed the time to act was drawing near.
The League of Nations sent investigators and published the Lytton Report condemning Japan's incursion. Japan's response was to withdraw from the League entirely. No country took action beyond tepid censure. The warlord Zhang Zuolin, who had controlled Manchuria, had already been assassinated by the Kwantung Army in 1928 - a murder staged to create the crisis that would justify expansion. His son, Zhang Xueliang, inherited the territory and pledged allegiance to the Nationalist government in Nanjing, creating at least the appearance of a unified China. That unity would soon be tested beyond its limits.
Japan called the conflict "The North China Incident" when fighting began near Beijing in July 1937, then changed the name to "The China Incident" when the Battle of Shanghai broke out the following month. The word "incident" carried legal weight. Neither country had made a formal declaration of war, and Japan calculated that keeping the conflict nominally small would prevent the United States - its primary source of petroleum and steel - from invoking the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. It was a war being waged under the cover of paperwork.
In Japanese propaganda, the invasion was recast as a holy war, expressed in the phrase "eight corners of the world under one roof." In 1940, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe launched the Taisei Yokusankai, a political consolidation movement, deepening the ideological framework around the campaign. Only in December 1941, when both sides formally declared war after Pearl Harbor, did Japan rename the conflict the "Greater East Asia War."
China, for its part, debated which date the war truly began. The traditional view, enshrined in the phrase "Eight Years' War of Resistance," dates the conflict from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937. But since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party's official position holds that the war began on the 18th of September 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria - a "Fourteen Years' War of Resistance." The longer timeline carries political significance: it lets China claim it fought the earliest and longest in the global anti-fascist struggle, and gives greater recognition to the role of northeast China in the resistance.
On the night of the 7th of July 1937, Japanese soldiers conducting military exercises about 16 km from Beijing claimed that a private named Shimura Kikujiro had gone missing. They demanded entry to the walled city of Wanping. The Chinese garrison of the 29th Army refused. Shots were exchanged in the confusion, and the question of who fired first has never been definitively resolved.
A local ceasefire was negotiated on July 11, and General Qin Dechun agreed to terms including an apology and the withdrawal of Chinese forces from Wanping. But the ceasefire did not reach central command in time. Chiang Kai-shek had already ordered four Central Army divisions into Hebei, violating the He-Umezu Agreement. The Konoe cabinet's Five Ministers Conference authorized three infantry divisions from mainland Japan. Major General Ishiwara tried to oppose the escalation but ultimately agreed to prepare for any contingency. Military cable lines were being cut. Tensions that had been carefully managed for years were slipping beyond anyone's control.
On the 17th of July, Chiang Kai-shek delivered the Lushan Statement, declaring that China had reached its "limit of endurance" and framing the local clash as a national survival question. The statement transformed a skirmish into a cause. On the 25th of July came the Langfang Incident, and on the 26th, the Guanganmen Incident. The Japanese China Garrison Army abandoned diplomatic efforts. On the 28th of July 1937, the IJA 20th Division and three independent combined brigades launched an offensive against the Chinese 29th Army. The campaign for Beiping and Tianjin concluded when the Taku Forts fell on the 30th of July.
Chiang Kai-shek concentrated his best troops north of Shanghai in August 1937 partly to impress the city's large foreign community and attract international support. On the 13th of August, Kuomintang soldiers attacked Japanese Marine positions, and the Imperial Japanese Army ultimately committed over 300,000 troops, naval vessels, and aircraft to take the city. After more than three months of fighting, the Japanese captured it at costs that far exceeded initial expectations.
In November 1937, the Japanese concentrated 220,000 soldiers and began a campaign against Nanjing, the KMT capital. Japanese generals had disobeyed orders by pursuing retreating Chinese forces past a designated restriction line, and the Army General Staff authorized the capture of Nanjing on the 28th of November 1937, hoping to force a conclusion to the conflict. After taking the city in December 1937, Japanese troops killed approximately 50,000 Chinese soldiers including 17 generals, then turned on the civilian population. Over the following weeks, they perpetrated what became known as the Nanjing Massacre: the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated at least 200,000 murders and 20,000 rapes. More than a third of the buildings in Nanjing and the surrounding towns were looted and burned.
These atrocities produced an unexpected consequence. International goodwill toward China increased. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already delivered his Quarantine Speech in Chicago on the 5th of October 1937, advocating an international quarantine of aggressor nations. Chiang, buoyed by this signal, held out for Western intervention that never fully arrived. The Nationalist government relocated to Chongqing. And when Chiang offered to accept Japan's original peace terms after Nanjing fell, Japan responded by hardening its demands to include recognition of Manchukuo. Prime Minister Konoe issued a statement on the 16th of January 1938, declaring that Japan would no longer deal with the government of Chiang Kai-shek.
Mao Zedong was quoted as describing the CCP's priorities in what he called the "721" policy: "We are fighting 70 percent for self development, 20 percent for compromise, and 10 percent against Japan." This was the open secret at the heart of the Second United Front.
The Xi'an Incident of the 12th of December 1936 had forced the United Front into existence. Zhang Xueliang, the "young marshal" who had lost Manchuria without resistance, kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek in Xi'an and demanded he stop fighting the Communists and turn against Japan. Joseph Stalin, who saw Chiang as a crucial buffer on his eastern border, pressured the CCP to negotiate. A temporary ceasefire was struck. The Communists formed the New Fourth Army and the 8th Route Army under nominal Nationalist command.
Cooperation peaked during the Battle of Taiyuan and the Battle of Wuhan in 1938. But Mao distrusted Chiang and shifted CCP strategy toward guerrilla warfare to preserve Communist military strength. By late 1938, the alliance was unraveling. CCP forces absorbed Chinese guerrilla units behind Japanese lines; those who refused were labeled "collaborators" and attacked. In June 1939, the Red Army under He Long attacked and wiped out a brigade of Chinese militia led by Zhang Yin-wu in Hebei. By January 1941, the New Fourth Army Incident marked the complete collapse of the Second United Front. Mao then began the final push to consolidate CCP power, developing the doctrinal framework that would become Mao Zedong Thought - while the Japanese, the Nationalists, and the Communists all fought their own separate wars in the same territory.
Japan's Three Alls Policy - "Kill all, loot all, burn all" - was implemented from 1941 to 1942, targeting Communist base areas in north and central China. Japanese forces conducted massacres, mass rape, deportations, poison gas deployment, and weaponized starvation against the rural population. These campaigns killed millions of Chinese civilians. They persisted until March 1945.
Biological warfare reached a scale without historical precedent. Japan carried out the largest biological warfare attacks in history during the war, causing at least 200,000 deaths. The Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign, launched on the 15th of May 1942 in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid, saw Japanese forces spread cholera, typhoid, plague, and dysentery pathogens across the region. Chinese estimates suggest as many as 250,000 civilians may have died of disease in that campaign alone, with the majority being Tanka boat people and other marginalized groups who could not flee. Around 90 percent of Ningbo's population had already evacuated before the battle started.
By 1943, famine had reached Guangdong. A letter received by Chinese in New York reported that 600,000 people died in Siyi from starvation. The suffering was not evenly distributed: it fell hardest on those with no connections, no resources, and no means of escape. Yet amid this devastation, not all communities capitulated. The Japanese attempt to recruit Hui Muslim forces failed comprehensively. Generals such as Bai Chongxi, Ma Hongbin, Ma Hongkui, and Ma Bufang maintained their resistance. When Japanese warplanes bombed Xining in 1941, it united all ethnicities in Qinghai against the Japanese. General Han Youwen directed the defense of the city while being directed by telephone from Ma Bufang, who sheltered in a military barracks. Han was buried in rubble during the bombardment and later rescued.
Japan's Operation Ichi-Go in 1944 was the largest single military campaign of the entire war. It mobilized 500,000 troops, 100,000 horses, 1,500 artillery pieces, and 800 tanks. Chinese armies, poorly supplied and unprepared, lost 300,000 casualties and large swathes of territory. The operation achieved its stated goals - seizing American air bases and establishing a potential railway corridor from Manchukuo to Hanoi - but did so too late to affect the outcome of the broader conflict. The failure of Nationalist forces in opposing this advance irreparably damaged the Roosevelt administration's confidence in Chiang Kai-shek.
The end came from multiple directions at once. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet declaration of war, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945 all converged. The Kwantung Army - over a million men, the primary Japanese fighting force - was destroyed by the Soviets in less than two weeks. Emperor Hirohito officially capitulated on the 15th of August 1945. The formal surrender was signed aboard a battleship on the 2nd of September 1945, in a ceremony attended by Chinese general Hsu Yung-chang alongside other Allied commanders.
China regained Taiwan, which Japan had held since the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. It was recognized as one of the Big Four Allied powers and became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. But the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists resumed in 1946. It ended in 1949 with Mao's victory, the Proclamation of the People's Republic of China, and the relocation of the Republic of China government to Taiwan - the island Japan had surrendered just four years earlier.
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Common questions
When did the Second Sino-Japanese War start and end?
The Second Sino-Japanese War is most commonly dated from the 7th of July 1937, when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident near Beijing escalated into full-scale war, through Japan's formal surrender on the 2nd of September 1945. China's official historiography since 2017 holds that the war began on the 18th of September 1931 with Japan's invasion of Manchuria, making it a fourteen-year conflict.
How many people died in the Second Sino-Japanese War?
The war resulted in the deaths of around 20 million people, the majority of them Chinese civilians. Japan's biological warfare attacks alone caused at least 200,000 deaths. The Battle of Wuhan resulted in up to 500,000 Chinese soldiers killed or wounded and up to 200,000 Japanese casualties.
What was the Nanjing Massacre in the Second Sino-Japanese War?
Following the capture of Nanjing in December 1937, Japanese troops perpetrated mass killings and sexual violence against the city's civilian population. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated at least 200,000 murders and 20,000 rapes. More than a third of the buildings in Nanjing and surrounding towns were looted and burned.
Why did Japan call the Second Sino-Japanese War an "incident"?
Japan used the term "incident" because neither country had made a formal declaration of war, and keeping the conflict nominally limited helped Japan avoid triggering the American Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. The United States was Japan's primary source of petroleum and steel, and a formal war declaration risked an American embargo. Japan only renamed the conflict the "Greater East Asia War" in December 1941 after both sides formally declared war following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
What was Japan's Three Alls Policy in China?
The Three Alls Policy - "Kill all, loot all, burn all" - was implemented from 1941 to 1942 in north and central China, targeting Communist base areas. Japanese forces conducted massacres, mass rape, deportations, poison gas deployment, and weaponized starvation. These campaigns killed millions of Chinese civilians and persisted until March 1945.
How did the Second Sino-Japanese War affect China's international status?
China was recognized as one of the Big Four Allied powers during World War II and became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. It also regained Taiwan, which Japan had held since 1895 under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China as the world's "Four Policemen."
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