Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945, is widely considered to begin with the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 1937 and end with the Japanese surrender in September 1945. I would argue that to understand the motives as to why Japan invaded China, it is essential to grasp their previous history of conflicts and tensions, beginning with the Japanese claim of Taiwan from China’s Qing Dynasty after the First Sino-Japanese war in 1895, right through to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. This conflict between the two marked a culmination of near a half century of growing Japanese imperialist policies, aimed at the creation of a new order in East Asia through dominating Chinese politics and militaristically in order to exploit their natural resources.…

In December 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army attacked during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In a span of about six weeks, the Japanese force engages in systematic killing, looting and raping of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. However, it is impossible to attribute the genocide to any single cause. It is acknowledged in this paper that a common dilemma faced while studying genocide is to justify its occurrence. Scholars have, for decades, made attempts to justify what causes and motivates…

Research Question: To what extent did the uprising of peasants during the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 contribute to the Chinese Communist Party’s victory over the Chinese Nationalist Party in the Chinese Revolution in 1946? Relevance of the Source: The two sources that are evaluated are Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William Hinton and The Reluctant Combatant: Japan and the Second Sino-Japanese War by Lin Si-Yun and Minoru Kitamura. These sources are relevant to my…

The Second Sino Japanese War - Japanese Atrocities Against the Chinese The Second Sino Japanese War was one of great importance for the world as a whole. It is said to have been fought from 1937 till 1945 but many argue that this strife was much longer than those dates would imply. Not only did this war largely impact relations between Japan and China, but it made public many of the atrocities that the Japanese committed against the Chinese. While these atrocities had been ongoing for decades,…

millions of people during the second Sino-Japanese war. The 1938 Yellow River Flood, also known as “Huayuankou (Flower Garden mouth) embankment breach event” was one of the most severe ecological disaster and the largest act of environmental warfare in history. Though the flood was claimed to be a strategic decision in order to halt Japanese marching to Wuhan under a mood close to panic at that time , people kept questioning the necessity of such massive casualties and the actual value comparing…

The First United Front specifically, was from 1923 to 1927, when the parties came together to keep relative peace. It was successful until 1927 when the Nationalists turned on the Communists (“United Front”, World History in Context). The Shanghai Massacre sparked the very beginning of the Chinese Civil War along with the collapse of the First United Front. Occurring in April 1927, The Shanghai Massacre is often regarded as the start of the Chinese Civil War. Communists were either killed,…

Manhua Journey to the West, a graphic novel by Zhang Guangyu in 1945, is a nod to the Chinese classic Journey to the Wets by Wu Cheng'en written in the year 1592. It is written around the reign of the KMT and during the second Sino-Japanese War. From which Zhang uses the style in which Journey to the West was written to "implicate" poke fun of the government and their policies. How does Zhang Guang use the classic Journey to the west to explain the events around 1945 circa China? Why does he…

as a country and how we can prevent repetition of horrific historical events. Japan and China are known for finding cleaver ways to hide, disguise, and/or protect specific historical events from becoming common knowledge within the respective country because the lack of pride that may stem from any one event. Japanese history in…

Opium War. The British government was exporting Opium to China. Chinese citizens were getting addicted to opium and eventually the Chinese government stopped opium import from Great Britain. This hurt the British economy and resulted in a war between the two countries. At the end of the Opium War China was forced to give up land and be colonized by western civilizations. The Opium War and influence of Western powers led to The self-strengthening movement. China adopted Western military…

to World War II, Japan invaded China, captured Nanking, and performed a number of cruel atrocities on the people in and around the city. This horrible event, known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, included brutality that rivaled the infamous Holocaust. “Many thousands of [the women] were killed after gang rape, and...others brutally injured and traumatized. Meanwhile, approximately a quarter of a million defenseless Chinese men were...murdered en masse, used for bayonet practice,…