“The conflict, which was fought between China’s competing Nationalists and Communist factions on one side and Imperial Japan on the other, stands as one of the darkest and deadliest chapters in human history.”

By Jack Demlow

TO MANY IN the West, China’s conflict with Japan remains little more than a sideshow to the wider Second World War. Yet the 14-year struggle was anything but a footnote to the wider history of the struggle to defeat the Axis. At its peak, more than 10 million soldiers were in action in epic battles that dwarfed anything seen in Western Europe. By the time of Japan’s surrender in 1945, more than 20 million civilians lay dead. Rivalled only by the bloody contest between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the Sino–Japanese War, which was fought between the competing Nationalists and Communist factions on one side and Imperial Japan on the other, stands as one of the darkest and deadliest chapters in human history. Yet, to this day, few outside of Asia know much about it. Here are 10 harrowing facts about this often–overlooked conflict. (MHN Ed.)

1. Japan began the war with a classic “false flag” operation

As far back as the late 19^th century, Japan had sought to expand its control on the Asian mainland. After the country’s successful 1894 war against the tottering Qing dynasty, Tokyo sought any opportunity to expand its territorial footholds there. And if Japan’s military planners were unable to find an existing crisis to leverage, they were only too happy to engineer their own. Case in point: the Sept. 18, 1931 explosion near Japan’s South Manchurian Railway. The blast was initially blamed on Chinese nationalists, leading Japan’s Kwantung Army, a garrison stationed in the region following the 1905 war with Russia, to occupy the city of Mukden. Only later was it revealed that the attack on the railway was not an act of local saboteurs, but a classic ‘false flag’ operation carried out under orders from rogue commanders as a pretext for an invasion of Manchuria. The resulting offensive, although unsanctioned by the government in Tokyo, eventually led to the fall of Manchuria within three months, much to the delight of the Japanese public. Eventually, Japan’s new prime minister and cabinet, which that came to power that December, endorsed the invasion.

2. Japan came to control a quarter of China during the war

Japan was not content with just the capture of Manchuria. In 1933, its army absorbed the Chinese province of Jehol. Tokyo argued that the region had been part of Manchuria all along and so should be part of their new puppet state of Manchukuo. A very uneasy peace between China and Japan followed China, on that was frequently interrupted by skirmishes. Once such clash occurred in 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge. The two-day battle triggered an all-out war between the two nations. Right from the beginning, Japan had the upper hand in the struggle. By 1938, Tokyo’s forces had moved down China’s coast past Shanghai and as far inland as Wuhan. By 1942, 25 percent of China’s land and a third of its population was under Japanese control. 

3. Japanese soldiers practiced cannibalization against POWs and civilians

Throughout history, cannibalism has been seen as an act of desperation by starving populations; Japanese forces used it as a weapon to terrorize their enemies. There are multiple confessions by Japanese soldiers that during their occupation of China, some officers and soldiers ate the flesh of Chinese civilians they killed. In his confession, one soldier named Nakao described a disturbing incident involving one of his comrades. “He captured a 30-year-old Chinese man, bayoneted him to death, cut off about 1.5 kg of flesh from his thigh, wrapped the flesh in cloth, and brought it to me,” recalled the soldier. “After the flesh was fried with pork, chicken, fish, and vegetables, all members of the squad of 40 soldiers and I ate the dish.” Another Japanese soldier confessed to raping a young woman and then cooking her flesh in a pot for his men to eat (allegedly due to a meat shortage, in this case). These actions paralleled the cannibalization of American and Indian POWs captured by Japanese soldiers during the war in the Pacific, crimes that also bore signs of being expressions of power.

4. Special brigades performed medical experiments on captured Chinese soldiers and civilians

Created by the Japanese army to study the effectiveness of biological and chemical weapons, Unit 731 famously performed all manner of experiments that mirrored the horrific human testing that occurred in Nazi concentration camps. Based out of Pingfan, Manchuria, the top-secret unit was concealed even from the Emperor to preserve the monarch’s honour. Within the confines of its main facility, Unit 731 tested the lethality of potassium cyanide and chloroform, often on “patients” who the physicians had already been using to observe the development of tuberculosis and epidemic hemorrhagic fever. One scientist, Hisato Yoshimura, froze captured subjects’ limbs in blocks of ice to different methods of rapidly thawing. One of the victims of this experiment was a three-day-old child. Other experiments included field testing bioweapons on Chinese villages and poisoning livestock. As the Japanese invasion seized more of China, other research centres sprang up across the occupied regions.

5. The war attracted American mercenaries

Known initially as the American Volunteer Group, the “Flying Tigers” were a brigade of U.S. air corps and navy who defended China against Japanese bombers. Since the United States was not at war with Japan at the time of the unit’s formation, the aviators had to resign from the armed forces in order to sign on effectively as soldiers-of-fortune. The group was formed by a retired captain of the Army Air Corps, Claire Lee Chennault, who was at that time the chief air advisor to the Nationalist Army. Even though their first battle took place after the U.S. had actually declared war on Japan, the Flying Tigers were never officially recognized for their service.

6. China’s warring factions joined forces to fight the common enemy

Though “The Second United Front” was the military alliance of Chinese Nationalists and Communists against Japanese invaders, the need for such an alliance (and the fact that the first one had not persisted) evidenced the fact that China was hardly united at the time. The nationalist Guomindang regime was headed by Chiang Kai-Shek, previously an important aide and chief of staff for Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. The rising power in the Communist camp was Mao Zedong, one of the twelve founders of the Chinese Communist Party and who would be particularly notable during the Sino-Japanese War for his encouragement of guerilla warfare. The CCP and Guomindang had allied in the First United Front in part as an effort by the CCP to win the nationalist revolutionaries over to communism, but these efforts were halted in 1927 when Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces killed thousands of communists in nationalist-controlled territory. In 1936, a Second United Front was needed in order to effectively fight Japan. This goal was achieved by the warlords Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, who kidnapped Chiang Kai-Shek to force him to end his crusades against the CCP and focus on the Japanese invasions.

7. Japanese genocides nearly wiped out whole ethnic minorities in China

Small, nomadic groups such as the Oroqen and the Hezhen were not spared from torment by the Japanese military. Members of the Oroqen faction were used for “bacterial experiments,” by army doctors while the Hezhen were rounded up and worked to death in forced labour camps. It is estimated that only 1,000 Oroquen and just 300 Hezhen survived the war, both populations having suffered 90 per casualties at the hands the enemy occupiers.

8. The Japanese even exterminated Chinese minorities in other countries.

Ethnic Chinese became targets where ever Japanese forces went. Over half of Singapore’s Sino population was wiped out. Known as the Sook Ching or “purge through cleansing,” the Imperial Japanese Army rounded up and slaughtered as many as 50,000 Chinese males in Singapore between ages 18 and 50 in early 1942. Criminals and suspected communists were executed as well. One ethnic Chinese survivor of the massacre, Lee Kuan Yew, later became prime minister of Singapore and pointed back to his experiences during Sook Ching as a reason he would not allow anyone to tread on Singapore again.

9. Thirty-six per cent of Japan’s “comfort women” were Chinese

The Japanese military famously forced as many as 400,000 women from its occupied territories into sex slavery. While Koreans made up the majority of these so-called “comfort women,” more than a third were Chinese. Women from Malaysia, the Philippines as well as Dutch and Australian ex-pats were also sent to military brothels. Those not abducted from occupied countries were recruited offered non-existent jobs in in factories or restaurants, only for their “employers” to imprison them in the infamous comfort stations. There the enslaved women were raped by Japanese soldiers. In the city of Nanjing alone there were 40 such facilities, including the largest in all of Asia, the “Hometown Comfort Station.” As an added ordeal, enslaved women might also be taken outside their home country if their captors so chose. Many of the victims, including Zhang Xian Tu from Shanxi, were ostracized after their release.

10. The more than 10,000 Japanese civilians who remained in China after the war were ostracized

Following the occupation of Manchuria, as many as one million Japanese civilians migrated there, many of them farmers lured by the promise of land. Following Tokyo’s surrender in 1945, it would take years to repatriate the colonists. By 1958, an estimated 10,000 Japanese women and children still lived in China; most of the males had been conscripted into the army and later killed or captured. Many of these holdouts, known as zanryu fujin, married Chinese husbands to protect them from retaliation amid the chaos following the war. When relations between Beijing and Tokyo improved in the 1960s, efforts were made by China to return the zanryu fujin to their former homeland. Yet, many in Japan saw them as turncoats for marrying outside of their race and their children were considered outsiders and barred from immigration. It would take until the 1980s before many were permitted to move to Japan, and even then, there seen as outcasts.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Jack Demlow is an intern at Pacific Atrocities Education in San Francisco, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of war crimes committed in the Pacific theatre of World War Two. He is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in history at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA, as part of the Class of 2019. In the spring of 2017 he studied abroad in Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, and Egypt as part of a Westmont program focused on studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and learning about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the context of the Holy Land.

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