Outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War
Japan invaded China in July 1937 and the war ran for eight years and killed some fifteen to twenty million people. The occasion was a night exercise at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking, where a Japanese soldier went missing, and both sides escalated a local incident within days. Japan had held Manchuria since 1931 and had assumed that a short campaign would produce a settlement. Chiang Kai-shek chose instead to fight at Shanghai in August, partly to draw the Japanese advance away from the north and partly to be seen resisting by foreign observers. The battle lasted three months and cost him most of his German-trained divisions. Nanjing fell in December, and the massacre that followed killed between 40,000 and 300,000 people depending on whose count is used and remains the most contested episode in East Asian history. The government withdrew up the Yangtze to Chongqing, dynamited the Yellow River dikes in 1938 to slow the advance and drowned several hundred thousand of its own people, and fought a war of space for time in which Japan held the cities and railways and could not hold the countryside. The Communists fought their own war behind the lines and grew from perhaps 40,000 to a million. The conflict merged into the Second World War in 1941 and ended with the Japanese surrender in 1945. The civil war resumed immediately. The war's memory is still an active dispute between the two countries. Japanese textbook revisions, ministerial visits to the Yasukuni shrine and the numbers at Nanjing produce diplomatic incidents at regular intervals, eighty years after the surrender.
- Year: 1937 CE
- Category: Political
