Editing Second Sino-Japanese War (section)

==Conclusion and aftermath==

===End of the Pacific War and the surrender of Japanese troops in China===
{{Main|Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki|Soviet invasion of Manchuria|Japanese Instrument of Surrender}}

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese had consistent tactical successes but failed to achieve strategic results.<ref name="Crean" />{{Rp|page=|pages=70}} Although it seized the majority of China's industrial capacity, occupied most major cities, and rarely lost a battle, Japan's occupation of China was costly.<ref name="Crean" />{{Rp|page=70}} Japan had approximately 50,000 military fatalities each year and 200,000 wounded per year.<ref name="Crean" />{{Rp|page=70}}[[File:3 September 1945 - Chungking Victory Parade.jpg|thumb|WWII victory parade at Chongqing on 3 September 1945]]

In less than two weeks the [[Kwantung Army]], which was the primary Japanese fighting force,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/glantz3/glantz3.asp |title=Leavenworth Papers No. 7 (August Storm: The Soviet 1945 Strategic Offensive in Manchuria) |access-date=2013-07-15 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080302130751/http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/glantz3/glantz3.asp |archive-date=2 March 2008 }}</ref><ref>Robert A. Pape. Why Japan Surrendered. ''International Security'', Vol. 18, No. 2 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 154–201</ref> consisting of over a million men but lacking in adequate armour, artillery, or air support, had been destroyed by the Soviets. Japanese Emperor [[Hirohito]] officially [[Surrender of Japan|capitulated]] to the Allies on 15 August 1945. The official surrender was signed aboard the battleship {{USS|Missouri|BB-63|6}} on 2 September 1945, in a ceremony where several Allied commanders including Chinese general [[Hsu Yung-chang]] were present.

After the Allied victory in the Pacific, General [[Douglas MacArthur]] ordered all Japanese forces within China (excluding [[Manchuria]]), Taiwan and French Indochina north of 16° north latitude to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek, and the Japanese troops in China formally surrendered on 9 September 1945, at 9:00.<ref name="surrender">[http://www.taiwandocuments.org/surrender02.htm Act of Surrender, 9 September 1945] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230402122255/http://www.taiwandocuments.org/surrender02.htm |date=2 April 2023 }} (page visited on 3 September 2015).</ref> The ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month was chosen in echo of the [[Armistice of 11 November 1918]] (on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) and because "nine" is a [[Numbers in Chinese culture#Nine|homophone of the word for "long lasting"]] in Chinese (to suggest that the peace won would last forever).<ref>Hans Van De Ven, "A call to not lead humanity into another war", ''[[China Daily]]'', 31 August 2015.</ref>

Chiang relied on American help in transporting Nationalist troops to regain control of formerly Japanese-occupied areas.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=3}} Non-Chinese generally viewed the behavior of these troops as undercutting Nationalist legitimacy, and these troops engaged in corruption and looting, leading to widespread views of a "botched liberation".<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=3}}

The Nationalist government seized Japanese-held businesses at the time of the Japanese surrender.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=92}} The Nationalist government made little effort to return these businesses to their original Chinese owners.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|pages=92–93}} A mechanism existed through which Chinese and foreign owners could petition for the return of their former property.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=92}} In practice, the Nationalist government and its officials retained a great deal of the seized property and embezzling property, particularly from warehouses, was common.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=93}} Nationalist officials sometimes extorted money from individuals in liberated territories under threat of labeling them as Japanese collaborators.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=93}}

Chiang's focus on his communist opponents prompted him to leave Japanese troops or troops of the Japanese puppet regimes to remain on duty in occupied areas so as to avoid their surrender to Communist forces.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=3}}

===Post-war struggle and resumption of the civil war===
{{Main|Chinese Civil War}}
[[File:重慶會談 蔣介石與毛澤東.jpg|thumb|Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong in 1945]]

In 1945, China emerged from the war nominally a great military power {{citation needed|date=October 2019}} but economically weak and on the verge of all-out civil war. The economy was sapped by the military demands of a long costly war and internal strife, by spiraling inflation, and by corruption in the Nationalist government that included profiteering, speculation and hoarding.

The poor performance of Nationalist forces opposing the Ichi-go campaign was largely viewed as reflecting poorly on Chiang's competence.<ref name=":02">{{Cite book |last=Coble |first=Parks M. |title=The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War |date=2023 |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |isbn=978-1-009-29761-5 |location=Cambridge New York, NY |author-link=Parks M. Coble}}</ref>{{Rp|page=3}} Chiang blamed the failure on the United States, particularly Stilwell, who had used Chinese forces in the Burma Campaign and in Chiang's view, left China insufficiently defended.<ref name=":02" />{{Rp|page=3}}

As part of the Yalta Conference, which allowed a Soviet sphere of influence in Manchuria, the Soviets dismantled and removed more than half of the industrial equipment left there by the Japanese before handing over Manchuria to China. Large swathes of the prime farming areas had been ravaged by the fighting and there was starvation and famine in the wake of the war. Many towns and cities were destroyed, and millions were rendered homeless by floods.

The problems of rehabilitation and reconstruction after the ravages of a protracted war were staggering, and the war left the Nationalists severely weakened, and their policies left them unpopular. Meanwhile, the war strengthened the Communists both in popularity and as a viable fighting force. At Yan'an and elsewhere in the communist controlled areas, Mao Zedong was able to adapt [[Marxism–Leninism]] to Chinese conditions. He taught party cadres to lead the masses by living and working with them, eating their food, and thinking their thoughts.

In Japanese-occupied areas, the Communists had established military and political bases from which it carried out guerilla warfare.<ref name=":022" />{{Rp|page=35}} The Communists built popular support in these areas, returning land to poor peasants, reducing peasant's rent, and arming the people.<ref name=":022" />{{Rp|page=35}} By Spring 1945, there were 19 Communist-governed areas in China in which 95 million people lived.<ref name=":022" />{{Rp|page=36}} In Fall 1945, the Communist armies had 1.27 million men and were supported by 2.68 million militia members.<ref name=":022" />{{Rp|page=36}}

Mao also began to execute his plan to establish a new China by rapidly moving his forces from Yan'an and elsewhere to Manchuria. This opportunity was available to the Communists because although Nationalist representatives were not invited to Yalta, they had been consulted and had agreed to the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in the belief that the Soviet Union would cooperate only with the Nationalist government after the war.

However, the Soviet occupation of Manchuria was long enough to allow the Communist forces to move in en masse and arm themselves with the military hardware surrendered by the Imperial Japanese Army, quickly establish control in the countryside and move into position to encircle the Nationalist government army in major cities of northeast China. Following that, the Chinese Civil War broke out between the Nationalists and Communists, which concluded with the Communist victory in [[mainland China]] and the retreat of the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1949.

===Aftermath===
[[File:AntijapaneseWarMemorialMuseum.jpg|thumb|China War of Resistance Against Japan Memorial Museum on the site where the [[Marco Polo Bridge Incident]] took place]]

The Nationalists suffered higher casualties because they were the main combatants opposing the Japanese in each of the 22 major battles (involving more than 100,000 troops on both sides) between China and Japan. The Communist forces, by contrast, usually avoided pitched battles with the Japanese, in which their guerrilla tactics were less effective, and generally limited their combat to guerrilla actions (the [[Hundred Regiments Offensive]] and the [[Battle of Pingxingguan]] are notable exceptions).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lovell |first=Julia |title=Maoism: A Global History |date=2019-09-03 |publisher=[[Doubleday (publisher)|Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group]] |isbn=978-0-525-65605-0 |pages=[https://books.google.com/books?id=kx1-DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT41 31] |language=en |oclc=1078879585 |quote=Though it is also worth pointing out that, in practice, Mao's recipe for guerrilla manoeuvres played a limited role in Chinese revolutionary wars during the 1930s and '40s. Nationalist armies carried most of the resistance to the Japanese during the Second World War, and Chinese Communist victory in the final years of the civil war up to 1949 was won through field battles that the Soviets taught the CCP how to fight. |author-link=Julia Lovell}}</ref> The Nationalists committed their strongest divisions in early battle against the Japanese (including the 36th, 87th, 88th divisions, the crack divisions of Chiang's Central Army) to defend Shanghai and continued to deploy most of their forces to fight the Japanese even as the Communists changed their strategy to engage mainly in a political offensive against the Japanese while declaring that the CCP should "save and preserve our strength and wait for favourable timing" by the end of 1941.<ref>Yang Kuisong, "The Formation and Implementation of the Chinese Communists' Guerrilla Warfare Strategy in the Enemy's Rear during the Sino-Japanese War", paper presented at Harvard University Conference on Wartime China, Maui, January 2004, pp. 32–36</ref>