“Horrors of War” was the name of a series of bubble-gum cards issued in the United States in the late 1930s. The pictures, dealing with bloodshed in the two faraway battlefields of Spain and China, often focused on the exotic aspects of their subject matter, for example Chinese soldiers equipped with umbrellas. But more than…
This blog has previously introduced a small, but growing number of re-enactors that specialize in the Chinese side of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Their expanding numbers are testimony to the strengthening awareness in the west of the burden shouldered by China in challenging Japanese imperialism years before Pearl Harbor. It’s a hobby, but it’s also…
Westerners watching the early stages of the Second Sino-Japanese War often noticed that the Chinese troops moving into battle were carrying large swords, in addition to their more modern equipment. Some foreign observers appear to have considered it an exotic, slightly quaint weapon to wield in a conflict which also involved the full lethal array…
The start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 resulted in some of the most dramatic footage of the 1930s. The belligerent parties, and especially the Japanese, took great care to document the hostilities with the help of film, understanding perfectly well the importance that this relatively new medium had in terms of boosting support for the war effort at…
Nations always go to war expecting to fight the war of the previous generation. The Second Sino-Japanese War was no exception. When hostilities broke out between China and Japan in 1937, the main frame of reference was the carnage on the Western Front two decades earlier. What this meant was, perhaps more than anything else, one…
In China, the Second Sino-Japanese War has provided rich source material for works of fiction ever since 1945. The most obvious example of this is the plethora of soap operas set during the war years, mixing unlikely romance with over-the-top battle scene acrobatics. However, the war has also inspired works in the more traditional art…
Three million — that’s the number of Japanese who had to be repatriated from areas traditionally considered Chinese at the end of the war in 1945. They included 2.6 million on the Chinese mainland, with 1.1 million in the northeastern provinces known then as Manchuria, and 1.5 million in the other areas. In addition, there…
In the late 1930s, while the heartland of China was being ravaged by war with Japan, a small number of Chinese were fighting a different battle 10,000 kilometers away. About 100 Chinese were serving on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, playing a small but visible part in the international forces battling the…
China is well-known across the world for its conduct of “panda diplomacy” – the practice of lending or renting out pandas to foreign zoos as a mean of establishing closer ties. What is less known is the fact that this particular type of diplomacy hails all the way back to the darkest hours of China’s…
The Japanese commander of military operations in the Shanghai area in late 1937 was the 59-year-old General Matsui Iwane. Today he is mainly remembered as a war criminal, because he was executed after the war for his role in the infamous Rape of Nanjing. . “He did nothing, or nothing effective to abate these horrors,”…
