32.0°N 118.7°E China Japan Invades China
Briefing
Japan's full-scale invasion in July 1937 opened the Second World War in Asia two years before Europe. That December, the massacre at Nanking killed as many as 300,000 civilians. The war that began here would tie down over half the Japanese army for eight years and cost perhaps fourteen million Chinese lives — a theater the West forgot almost as soon as it ended.
Books Covering This Event (3)
Popular History
The forgotten massacre of 1937, when the Japanese army murdered and raped its way through China's capital.
China's eight-year war against Japan — fourteen million dead, and a story the West wrote out of the war.
This Event on Screen
Screen adaptations of books on this page, each linked to the book it came from: Empire of the Sun (1987).
The War in Books: Japan’s War in China
Where the Second World War began in Asia, and why the West lost sight of it.
Most Western histories date the Second World War to September 1939. In China it had been under way for two years by then, and it would run for eight. For much of the post-war period the conflict was squeezed out of Western memory, partly by the politics of the Cold War.
Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally is the book that does most to correct this. It argues that China’s long resistance mattered to the Allied victory and treats Chiang Kai-shek, Mao and Wang Jingwei as figures making real choices under terrible pressure. Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, published in 1997, did more than any other English-language book to bring the massacre of 1937 to wide attention. It remains powerful, though historians have challenged some of its details, and it is better read as a work of moral witness than as the last word. J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, drawn from his own childhood in an internment camp on the edge of Shanghai, gives the war a very different, dreamlike strangeness. Start with Mitter for the whole picture, and add the others for what numbers alone cannot convey.