Remembering China’s role in the global anti-fascist war
By Carlos Martinez
The second of September 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, bringing an end to World War 2.
China’s role in the war, and indeed the very existence of the Pacific Theatre, has to a significant degree been written out of history. In his book China’s war with Japan: 1937 – 1945, British historian Rana Mitter writes that, “for decades, our understanding of [World War 2] has failed to give a proper account of the role of China. If China was considered at all, it was as a minor player, a bit-part actor in a war where the United States, Soviet Union and Britain played much more significant roles” (Rana Mitter, China’s war with Japan: 1937 – 1945; the struggle for survival, Penguin Books, 2014, p.5).
However, China was the first country to wage war against fascist occupation, and the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression was of decisive importance to the overall global victory over fascism. In the course of 14 years of war (1931-45), China suffered over 35 million casualties, and around 20 percent of its people were made refugees.
The war started in 1931
Following its emergence as a capitalist country in the second half of the 19th century, Japan had been steadily expanding its colonial ambitions in relation to China, Korea and the Russian Far East. Taiwan, the Penghu Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula were ceded by China to Japan in 1895 under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, at the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese War.
After Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), it started to extend its sphere of influence in Manchuria (north east China), which was seen as an essential source of raw materials, as well as being a crucial strategic location for further aggression against both Russia and China. Taking advantage of the weakness and instability of the young Republic of China, which had been established on 1 January 1912, the Japanese Empire issued its notorious Twenty-One Demands in 1915, forcing China to grant extensive economic privileges, including extensions of Japanese leases and expanded mining and railway rights in Manchuria.
On 18 September 1931, Japanese troops carried out a false flag operation, destroying a section of the Japan-owned South Manchuria Railway in Shenyang. Pinning the blame on militant Chinese nationalists, Japan used the incident as a pretext to launch a full invasion and occupation of Manchuria. Japanese armed forces moved quickly to separate the region from China, creating the Japanese-aligned puppet state of Manchukuo, with a population of around 35 million.
In the People’s Republic of China, Japan’s invasion of north east China is considered to be the start of the world anti-fascist war since, although the Chinese government of the time, led by Chiang Kai-shek, ordered ‘non-resistance’, a number of volunteer armies – predominantly organised by the Communist Party of China (CPC) – engaged in guerrilla operations against the Japanese occupation. It is noteworthy that these volunteer armies included large numbers of Koreans, including Kim Il Sung, at a time when the Korean resistance movement against Japanese colonisation was centred in north east China.
The Kuomintang (KMT) government continued its policy of appeasement, signing the Tanggu Truce in May 1933, which resulted in China giving de facto recognition to Manchukuo and agreeing to a demilitarised zone extending 100km south of the Great Wall, with the Great Wall itself under Japanese control. Chiang Kai-shek’s priority was not to defend China’s sovereignty but to annihilate the communists, as is recognised by Rana Mitter: “The Tanggu Truce of 1933 had created a breathing space in Sino-Japanese relations that allowed Chiang more time and space to direct his armies against the CPC” (op. cit., p.62).
Resistance remained the near-exclusive preserve of the CPC and its allies for six long years. In February 1936, the assorted anti-Japanese guerrilla forces were reorganised into a single north east Anti-Japanese United Army, led by the CPC and supported by the Soviet Union. The United Army was able to deal some important blows to the Japanese occupation forces.
United Front
The Kuomintang came under intense pressure to fight back against Japanese occupation. On 9 December 1935, a gathering of a few thousand students in Beijing (at that time known as Beiping) was brutally suppressed by the Kuomintang army and police. In the ensuing days, students in cities around the country held large demonstrations calling on the government to initiate full-scale nationwide resistance against Japanese imperialism. Among the students’ demands was that the KMT end its war against the CPC.
Later that month Mao Zedong gave a report, On tactics against Japanese imperialism, in which he highlighted the urgent need to establish a national united front to fight the invaders:
“The Japanese imperialists have already shown their intention of penetrating south of the Great Wall and occupying all China. Now they want to convert the whole of China from a semi-colony shared by several imperialist powers into a colony monopolised by Japan… The workers and the peasants are all demanding resistance… What is the basic tactical task of the Party? It is none other than to form a broad revolutionary national united front… The task of the Japanese imperialists, the collaborators and the traitors is to turn China into a colony, while our task is to turn China into a free and independent country with full territorial integrity… What the revolutionary forces need today is to organise millions upon millions of the masses and move a mighty revolutionary army into action. The plain truth is that only a force of such magnitude can crush the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators”.
Chiang Kai-shek and his allies remained intransigent. At the urging of the Soviet Union, some secret negotiations between the KMT and CPC took place, but little progress was made. In December 1936, patriotic KMT generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng detained Chiang in Xi’an, where he was coordinating the next stage of his suppression campaign against the communists. The generals demanded that Chiang agree to end his war on the CPC and establish an alliance of all patriotic forces against Japanese expansionism.
Under duress, Chiang agreed to such an alliance. Although he publicly renounced the agreement after his release, negotiations continued and the United Front was formally established in 1937, shortly after the 7 July Marco Polo Bridge incident, which marked the beginning of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China.
Although the KMT tried to hedge its bets, the communists propagated a clear message of unity which resonated with the vast majority of the Chinese people:
“Defend our homeland to the last drop of our blood! Let the people of the whole country, the government, and the armed forces unite and build up the national united front as our solid Great Wall of resistance to Japanese aggression! Let the Kuomintang and the Communist Party closely co-operate and resist the new attacks of the Japanese aggressors! Drive the Japanese aggressors out of China!”
Extraordinary heroism and sacrifice
As per the agreement between the CPC and KMT, the northern units of the Red Army were reorganised into the Eighth Route Army of the National Revolutionary Army, and the southern units into the New Fourth Army. At the end of August, the Eighth Route Army crossed the Yellow River to march to the frontlines, and on 25 September its 115th division scored the first victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan, ambushing the Fifth Division of the Japanese army in Pingxingguan, Shanxi, wiping out more than a thousand Japanese troops.
In an important speech marking the 60th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, President Hu Jintao recounted:
“Resistance forces under the leadership of the KMT and the CPC were engaged in operations against Japanese aggressors on frontal battlefields and in the enemy’s rear respectively, forming a strategic common front against the enemy. As the main force on frontal battlefields, the KMT army organised a series of major campaigns, particularly the Shanghai, Xinkou, Xuzhou and Wuhan campaigns during the initial phase of the War, which dealt heavy blows to the Japanese army. In the enemy’s rear areas, the CPC went all out to mobilise the masses to engage in extensive guerrilla warfare. The Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, the South China Guerrillas, the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, and other anti-Japanese armed forces of the people fought bravely against the Japanese occupation. The victory of the Pingxingguan Battle broke the myth that the Japanese army is invincible. The Hundred-Regiment Campaign boosted the confidence of the soldiers and civilians throughout China to win the war of resistance”.
The major cities on the eastern seaboard fell to Japan in the second half of 1937, starting with Beijing and Tianjin in July, Shanghai in November, and the Kuomintang’s capital Nanjing in December. Atrocities were perpetrated everywhere, but Nanjing was singled out for the most horrific episodes of mass murder and widespread rape in history. Rana Mitter writes: “From the first hours of the occupation, the Japanese troops seem to have abandoned all constraints. For the next six weeks, until the middle of January 1938, the soldiers of the Japanese Central China Area Army embarked on an uninterrupted spree of murder, rape and robbery” (Rana Mitter, op. cit., p.129).
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, the Eastern counterpart to the Nuremberg trials, estimated that 260,000 people were killed in the weeks following Japan’s seizure of the city. Tens of thousands of women were raped. The Nanjing Massacre is widely understood to be, in the memorable words of the late historian Iris Chang, “an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history” (The rape of Nanking: the forgotten holocaust of World War II, Basic Books, p14).
With the capture of the country’s largest cities and the government’s relocation to Chongqing, the conflict developed into a war of attrition. The majority of the Chinese victories were scored by the communist-led armies in the base areas, relentlessly carrying out guerrilla and sabotage operations.
Mao Zedong’s theory of people’s war was developed to a large degree during the war of resistance against Japan. By building up the support of the peasantry, the CPC-led military units were able to achieve the highest levels of mass mobilisation. As Mao wrote in On Guerrilla War in 1937, people’s war means “military strength organised by the active people and inseparable from them”. These ideas would go on to find applicability in many places around the world, including Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Palestine.
Ultimately, the combined Chinese forces were able to fight Japan to a standstill. On so doing, they pinned down over a million Japanese troops on the Chinese front – approximately two-thirds of Japan’s military strength. This was a major impediment to Japan’s war plan, which involved quickly subduing China and moving on to invade the Soviet Union and occupy South and West Asia. Mitter writes that “the success of the Allies in fighting on two fronts at once, in Europe and Asia, was posited in significant part on making sure that China stayed in the war” (op. cit., p.6). As Hu Jintao observed:
“For a long time, we Chinese contained and pinned down the main forces of Japanese militarism in the China theatre, and annihilated more than 1.5 million Japanese troops. This played a decisive role in the total defeat of Japanese aggressors. The war of resistance lent a strategic support to battles of China’s allies, assisted the strategic operations in the European and Pacific theatres, and restrained and disrupted the attempt of Japanese, German and Italian fascists to coordinate their strategic operations… The Chinese people made indelible historic contributions to the eventual defeat of the reactionary Fascist forces worldwide”.
Historic significance
In his address in 2015 at the Commemoration of the 70th snniversary of the victory of the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression, President Xi Jinping attested to the historic significance of China’s victory:
“The Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the world anti-fascist war were a decisive battle between justice and evil, between light and darkness, and between progress and reaction. In that devastating war, the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression started the earliest and lasted the longest.
“The victory of the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression is the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times. This great triumph crushed the plot of the Japanese militarists to colonise and enslave China and put an end to China’s national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times. This great triumph re-established China as a major country in the world and won the Chinese people respect of all peace-loving people around the world. This great triumph opened up bright prospects for the great renewal of the Chinese nation and set our ancient country on a new journey after gaining rebirth.
As such, the war marks a turning point in modern Chinese history, and provided the foundations for the success of the Chinese Revolution. “Precisely on the basis of this victory the CPC proceeded to lead the Chinese people in winning the new-democratic revolution and founding the People’s Republic of China, which represents the greatest and most profound social transformation in China’s history” (Hu Jintao).
But the significance of the victory reverberates beyond China’s borders. As described above, China made an indispensable contribution to the overall Allied victory in the world anti-fascist war. Furthermore, Japan’s defeat was a victory for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist forces across Asia, and gave impetus to the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948.
The Korean people’s heavy involvement in the fight to overthrow Japanese fascism was recalled by Comrade Kim Jong Un at the 15 August celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Korea’s liberation: “The armed struggle waged by the outstanding sons and daughters of the Korean people against the Japanese Empire, which emerged as an Asian power, was a bloody, life-and-death resistance in which they endured harsh trials and painful sacrifices, taking upon themselves the fate of their homeland and their descendants. The feats of the anti-Japanese revolution, which they carried out with their steadfast stance of independence, constitute irrefutable testimony to the journey taken by the Korean people to achieve independence through their own resources”.
The courage, sacrifice, daring and strategic brilliance demonstrated by the Chinese people in the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, as well as the contribution of their Korean allies, form an indelible chapter in the history of the struggle for a world free from fascism, militarism, colonialism and imperialism. Not only did it lay the basis for the victory of socialism in China but also in the DPRK (it would have been the whole of Korea had it not been for the US occupation of the south). As Comrade Kim Jong Un movingly declared, it was thanks to the revolutionary heroism shown in the fight that: “We will prosper and build the communism desired by the revolutionary martyrs“.