Why is China considered one of the five major victorious nations of World War II?

 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.

What’s a fact about World War II that is not commonly taught in schools?

 The fact that China despite being poor and weak was able to survive and resist Japan was literally the reason why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Of all the Allies, China actually fought the longest, for fourteen long years. It had no industry to arm and supply its millions of soldiers, nor did they had the money to pay them. Japan ruled the skies, and their warships patrol China’s rivers from the Yangtze to the Pearl River.

And yet, China survived, its armies, greatly inferior they were compared to the enemy or any of its worldwide contemporaries, remained intact, victorious even.

While they have lost the battles at Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan, the Chinese then won battles at Taierzhuang, Wanjialing, Shanggao, and three times at Changsha. Mao’s Communists for their part undertook their own offensive involving hundred guerrilla regiments, destroying railroads and attacking behind enemy lines, further negatively impacting Japan’s invasion.

Their failing invasion of China, initially successful at first, has drained Japan’s resources for little to no gain. Worse, Western nations now refused to trade with them and provide them with the needed resources, such as scrap metal and oil. If Japan will not have these resources, not only their invasion would come to a stop, they might also be driven out of the country altogether. After all, the Chinese themselves have already did two successful all-out offensives entirely on their own: the Winter Offensive which made minor gains while also defeating Japanese forces in Henan and Suiyuan provinces, and the aforementioned Communist Hundred Regiments’ Offensive that degraded the ability of the Japanese to supply their forces in the field.

So Japan’s leaders were like “give us what we need and let us trade with you or we attack you” and when America refused, they then attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese thought that the Americans would simply give in to their demands, but no. They blundered themselves into fighting a multi-front war while still dealing with their bogged-down invasion of China.

During the closing months of the war, the Chinese are now actively engaged on a grand offensive aimed to wipe out the Japanese occupants and liberate the occupied territory. Two atom bombs dropped in the Japanese mainland that forced their emperor to announce surrender stopped them from continuing their offensive, as the invading Japanese forces surrendered en masse to the Chinese army anyway.

Chinese officers inspecting a surrendered Japanese unit before herding them to a prisoner of war camp, September 1945.

By the war’s end in 1945, China, having survived and remained in the field for 14 years, emerged as the strongest nation in Asia.