Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between China and Japan from July 1937 to August 1945, and it merged into the Pacific war of the second world war. Japan had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and fought in north China from 1933; the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing on 7 July 1937 escalated into full-scale war. Japan took Beijing, took Shanghai after a three-month battle, and took Nanjing in December, where Japanese troops massacred large numbers of civilians and prisoners, an atrocity whose death toll is still disputed. The Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek moved first to Wuhan and then to Chongqing, and the nationalists and the communists, formally united in a second united front, fought on with very different strategies: conventional defence by the nationalists in the east, guerrilla war by the communists behind Japanese lines. China's resistance tied down more than a million Japanese soldiers and kept the country from capitulating, at a cost of millions of civilian deaths from massacres, famine and displacement. The war ended with Japan's surrender in August 1945, leaving China on the victorious side but exhausted, and the civil war resumed within a year. The war destroyed China's coastal industry and forced the government to move factories inland.