Question

What was an effect of Japanese actions in China in the 1930s?

Answer 1

During the invasion, the Japanese inflicted mass casualties on Chinese civilians, killing millions and displacing millions more.

Answer 2

Japan declared war on China in 1937. To Chinese scholars, WWII started in 1937. At the time, China was fighting itself in a full-blown civil war since 1927, the main rivals mainly being the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party. Japan interfered in the Chinese Civil War and even though the Communists and the Nationalists formed a alliance and fought the Japanese together ,the Japanese claimed tremendous victories, because the Communists and Nationalist were recovering from fighting each other. For the people living there, life was tragic, to say at the least. To put it in a way, there were literal competitions that determined which Japanese military general was better by seeing who could behead the most Chinese civilians in 5 minutes. To make matters worse, they were even commentated as if they were a baseball game. The US supplied only the Nationalist Party, mainly because the US opposed communism in any shape or form, and also the fact the US and other countries recognised the Nationalist Party as the ‘main’ party that ruled China. Japan soon saw its victories being turned against them, after the Chinese gaining some win against the Japanese, the Soviet Union’s invasion into Japanese-occupied Manchuria and the American’s campaign of ‘ Island-hopping’ across South-east Asia. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered after the US bombed two of Japan’s most crucial cities. Back in China, the civil war that was put on hold started again. Because the Nationalist Party fought the Japanese more than the Communist Party, the Nationalist Party suffered more casualties and so the Communist Party had an advantage. Also, during when the Japanese were conquering China, the Communist Party’s main job was to secure Chinese land that wasn’t touched by the Japanese. Also, the leaders of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, convinced the people they met to support China and the Communist Party. So the Communist Party also had more support than the exhausted Nationalist Party. The Nationalist Party also made some bad decisions which lead some of the Nationalist Party’s best troops to join the Communists. The Nationalist were pushed out of Mainland China by the Communists and onto the island of Taiwan, were the Nationalist Party of China, continues to rule over.