Obviously, China’s role in World War II is far less remembered than events like the Normandy landings, Pearl Harbor, and Battle of Stalingrad.
And yet China was at the heart of the war in the East.
China entered the war earliest and fought the longest. China’s resistance to Japanese fascism began with the September 18 Incident in 1931 and lasted until Japan’s surrender in 1945—a total of 14 years, making it the longest-running anti-fascist war waged by any country.
The Chinese battlefield tied down a huge share of Japan’s army for years. When the Pacific War began, about 70% of Japan’s army was reportedly tied down in China, preventing Japan from moving north to coordinate with Germany against the Soviet Union and delaying its southward expansion into the Pacific. During the eight-year full-scale war of resistance, Chinese forces reportedly killed or incapacitated about 2.8 million Japanese troops.
That contribution came at an enormous cost. After 1937 alone, more than 35 million Chinese military personnel and civilians were killed or wounded, while direct and indirect economic losses reached hundreds of billions of dollars. The scale of China’s sacrifice was among the greatest of the Allied powers.
And China’s role did not end when the fighting stopped. It was also one of the major powers that helped shape the postwar international order. In 1942, China was one of the four major Allied powers that led the signing of the Declaration by United Nations. And in 1945, China was one of the four sponsoring powers of the San Francisco Conference and became one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, formally recognizing its status as a major power in the postwar international order.
Without China, the course of World War II would have been very different.