Editing Second Sino-Japanese War (section)

===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>