China’s forgotten World War: The West has much to learn

On September 3, China will celebrate Victory Day – the anniversary of Japan’s capitulation in 1945. This year marks the 80th anniversary of that historic moment. The country is commemorating the milestone with a series of events, culminating in President Xi Jinping’s speech at Tiananmen Square, followed by a military parade in the heart of Beijing.

For China, the Second World War holds as much significance as it does for Europe or Russia. Yet in the West, the Asian battlefield is poorly understood and often overlooked. While everyone knows about Pearl Harbor, the Normandy landings, the Battle of Stalingrad, Auschwitz, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, far fewer have heard of the Mukden incident, the Marco Polo Bridge incident, the Nanjing Massacre, or Unit 731.

And yet it was the Chinese people who paid one of the heaviest prices of the war. Just as the world has rightly learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, it must also confront the reality of Japan’s war crimes – and how, after 1945, the United States and its allies shielded many Japanese perpetrators, even exploiting the results of their atrocities for Cold War objectives.

The Second World War exists in multiple national narratives. Europeans date the war’s outbreak to September 1, 1939, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. For the Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War began on June 22, 1941, with Nazi Germany’s massive assault. For the US, the war only truly started with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941.

Yet these narratives together form a larger picture of aggressors and victims, crimes and just struggles. In recent years, however, this collective memory has faced systematic attempts at reinterpretation, aimed at relativizing the crimes of Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, and their allies. In this revisionist history, the Soviet Union is portrayed as an aggressor, the liberation of Europe by the Red Army is reframed as occupation, while the decisive role in defeating the Axis is attributed primarily to the US and Britain. Rooted in a Eurocentric reading of history, this narrative marginalizes the stories of others. To counter such historical revisionism and nihilism, a truly global perspective on our shared past is essential.

For China, the war started on September 18, 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria and created the puppet state of Manchukuo. This marked the beginning of the “War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.” Despite being economically, technologically, and militarily weaker, China resisted Japan for over 14 years. The Communist Party of China took the lead in confronting the invaders, declaring war on Japan as early as April 1932, in contrast to Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government, which leaned toward appeasement and often treated the communists as a greater threat than the Japanese occupiers.

By late 1936, the communists and the Kuomintang had agreed to form a “United Front,” mobilizing nationwide resistance. This became crucial after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, which triggered a full-scale Japanese invasion. The brutal Nanjing Massacre followed, during which Japanese forces slaughtered at least 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war in just six weeks.

Japan’s expansion was driven by a racist ideology of superiority and the ambition to dominate all of Asia – strikingly similar to Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum and a European empire. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Mao Zedong called for an international united front against fascism, a strategy that soon bore fruit.

In January 1942, China joined Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union in signing the Declaration of the United Nations, soon endorsed by 22 other countries. This laid the foundation for coordinated global action against the Axis powers. China became a vital contributor: its battlefield tied down much of Japan’s military capacity, preventing Tokyo from invading the USSR, India, or Australia.

Chinese forces are estimated to have killed over 1.5 million Japanese soldiers, while nearly 1.3 million surrendered to China after Japan’s capitulation. From 1931 to 1945, China destroyed more than two-thirds of Japan’s ground forces. But the price was staggering: more than 35 million Chinese dead – exceeding the Soviet Union’s 27 million, and dwarfing US losses of around 500,000.

The scale of Japanese war crimes in China and across Asia is comparable to the Holocaust – yet far less acknowledged in the West. The Nanjing Massacre remains one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. At the same time, Japan’s Unit 731 carried out horrific biological and chemical warfare experiments on tens of thousands of prisoners, including civilians. Victims were vivisected without anesthesia, deliberately infected with plague and cholera, or used for frostbite and weapons testing.

The war did not end in 1945 with complete justice. In Europe, many German scientists and officers who had served the Nazi regime were quietly absorbed into Western structures. Under Operation Paperclip, hundreds of Nazi engineers and doctors, some implicated in war crimes, were brought to the US to work on rocketry, medicine, and intelligence. Their expertise was valued more than the lives destroyed by their experiments and ideology.

In Asia, a similar pattern emerged. Leaders of Japan’s Unit 731, responsible for some of the most gruesome human experiments in history, were granted immunity by the US in exchange for their research data, which Washington considered useful for biological weapons development. The atrocities committed against Chinese, Korean, and Soviet prisoners were buried under Cold War secrecy, while war criminals went on to live freely, some even prospering in postwar Japan. These choices reveal a troubling double standard: while Germany and Japan were defeated militarily, their crimes were selectively forgotten when they became convenient allies against the Soviet Union and, later, China.

This history carries a clear warning for the present. Just as Cold War politics led the West to cover up and even profit from fascist crimes, today’s elites in Washington, London, and Brussels are engaged in rewriting history to serve new confrontations. By downplaying the sacrifices of China and the Soviet Union and magnifying their own role, they prepare Western societies for a new round of hostility. Historical memory becomes a battlefield in itself, where uncomfortable truths are erased, and narratives are crafted to justify military build-ups and geopolitical confrontation.

Unlike Western liberal elites, who have provoked new conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and revived militarism while attempting to rewrite history, China has taken a different path. It promotes peace, favors diplomacy over confrontation, and seeks to build international cooperation instead of division. One way it does so is by cultivating shared historical memory of the “World Anti-Fascist War,” as China refers to World War II.

This year, Xi Jinping’s participation in Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations, Vladimir Putin’s planned presence in Beijing this September, and the joint Sino-Russian statement of May 8 all underscore that China and the Soviet Union bore the greatest sacrifices in defeating fascism and militarism. Both warned against revising the memory and outcomes of the war and reaffirmed their commitment to the UN-based international system.

There was a time when even Western leaders acknowledged these facts. In April 1942, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated: “We remember that the Chinese people were the first to stand up and fight against the aggressors in this war; and in the future a still unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity, not only in eastern Asia but in the whole world.”

His words now sound prophetic. China does not commemorate its victory only to honor the past. It does so to remind the world that peace is never guaranteed – and that history must not be rewritten to serve temporary political interests.