Asia's World War began years before Pearl Harbor
Full-scale war between China and Japan is usually dated from the 7 July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge clash near Beijing, yet many Chinese histories now start the fourteen-year war with the 1931 Mukden false flag and Manchukuo. Roughly twenty million people died before Japan's 1945 surrender.
After staging the Mukden incident on 18 September 1931, Japan seized Manchuria and installed the puppet state of Manchukuo. Skirmishes continued through Shanghai and North China until the 1937 bridge incident ignited nationwide invasion. Following the grinding Battle of Shanghai, Japanese forces took the Nationalist capital Nanjing in 1937 and carried out the Nanjing Massacre. Chinese naming often stresses War of Resistance; Japanese official language long preferred euphemisms such as China Incident.
Soviet aid paused after the April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan. December 1941's attack on Pearl Harbor and Japanese declarations of war on the United States and Britain pulled the China theatre into the wider Pacific struggle. U.S. Lend-Lease then became China's main financial and military pipeline, with the British Empire also supporting the Chinese war effort against Japan and its puppet regimes.
Japan formally surrendered on 2 September 1945 after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet entry into the war, and invasion of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Korea. The conflict's civilian toll and biological-warfare attacks left a long memorial politics: Mainland and Taiwanese usage emphasises resistance, while dating schemes still argue among 1931, 1937, and fifteen-year frames that reshape how textbooks count the war's opening act.
The middle years turned into a contest of distance. When Wuhan, then serving as China's working capital, fell in 1938, the Nationalist government withdrew inland to Chongqing. Chinese wins at Changsha and Japan's overstretched supply lines produced a stalemate by 1939. Communist units in Shaanxi kept up sabotage and guerrilla raids, launching the Hundred Regiments Offensive in August 1940, and Japan answered with scorched-earth campaigns across the north and centre that killed millions of civilians. Supplies later arrived over the Burma Road and, once that route was cut, by American aircraft flying over the Himalayas.
Source: Second Sino-Japanese War
