The Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, including the fall of Shanghai and Nanjing, the Rape of Nanjing, the move of the capital to Chongqing, and the stalemate of 1938 to 1941

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain how a local clash at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937 escalated into full-scale war, how the KMT lost the eastern cities by late 1938, how the war reached stalemate from 1938 to 1944, and what the war meant for Chinese society. Strong answers integrate Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing, Wang Jingwei's collaboration, and foreign aid.

The answer

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident

The Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao) crossing of the Yongding River, ten miles west of Beiping, was the only Beiping-Hankou Railway crossing. Under the Boxer Protocol (1901) Japanese troops were stationed in the area. On the night of 7 July 1937 a Japanese soldier went missing during a night exercise. The Japanese garrison commander demanded entry to the walled town of Wanping; the Chinese garrison refused. Shooting broke out around 4 a.m. on 8 July.

Local commanders attempted to negotiate. Tokyo dispatched three divisions north. Chiang gave a speech at Lushan on 17 July 1937 setting out the conditions on which he would accept further Japanese expansion: none. Major fighting resumed on 25 July. Beiping fell on 29 July, Tianjin on 30 July. War was not formally declared by either side but was effectively total from August.

The Battle of Shanghai

Chiang chose to open a second front at Shanghai to internationalise the war and protect his Yangtze Valley heartland. The Battle of Shanghai (13 August to 26 November 1937) drew in his best German-trained divisions (around 700,000 KMT troops in total) against around 300,000 Japanese.

The battle was savage. KMT losses were around 250,000, including most of the elite German-trained divisions. Japanese losses were around 70,000. Shanghai's Chinese districts were destroyed by bombing and street fighting. The International Settlement remained nominally neutral, an island in the wreckage.

The battle did not save Shanghai but it bought time, demonstrated Chinese willingness to fight, and shifted Japanese forces away from the planned northern thrust into Inner Mongolia and the Soviet border.

The Rape of Nanjing

Japanese forces under General Matsui Iwane took Nanjing on 13 December 1937. The retreating KMT failed to organise an evacuation or a defence of the population.

Over the next six weeks, Japanese soldiers committed what came to be called the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanking. Death estimates range from around 40,000 (revisionist Japanese) to over 300,000 (Chinese official). Most Western scholarship accepts a range of around 200,000 to 300,000 killed. Perhaps 20,000 women were raped. The Nanjing Safety Zone organised by John Rabe (German Siemens manager, NSDAP member) and other Western residents sheltered around 200,000 civilians.

The atrocity destroyed the chance of negotiated settlement, hardened Chinese resistance, and shaped international perception of Japan in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor.

The Yellow River breach and the loss of Wuhan

Chiang's government moved to Wuhan, then in October 1938 to Chongqing in Sichuan. To slow the Japanese advance toward Wuhan, KMT engineers deliberately breached the Yellow River dykes at Huayuankou on 9 June 1938. The flood spread across three provinces, drowned perhaps 800,000 Chinese, displaced 4 million, and slowed but did not stop the Japanese.

Wuhan fell on 27 October 1938. Guangzhou had fallen on 21 October. By the end of 1938 Japan held the eastern cities, the coast, the major rail lines, and most heavy industry. The KMT held the south-west from Chongqing.

The stalemate 1938-1941

By 1939 the war had entered a long stalemate. Japan held the "points and lines" (cities and railways) of the east. The KMT held Chongqing and the south-west. Communist base areas grew rapidly behind Japanese lines (covered in the Yan'an dot point). Japanese punitive sweeps (sanko sakusen, "kill all, burn all, loot all") devastated rural north China.

Wang Jingwei and collaboration

Wang Jingwei, KMT veteran and Chiang's rival, defected from Chongqing in December 1938. He set up a "reorganised" KMT government at Nanjing in March 1940 under Japanese tutelage. Wang's regime held nominal authority in Japanese-occupied China; in practice the Kwantung Army and the Japanese Northern China Area Army ran the territory. Wang died of natural causes in November 1944; the regime collapsed at the Japanese surrender.

Foreign aid

The Soviet Union supplied the KMT extensively from 1937 to 1941: around 1,000 aircraft, 2,000 pilots and technicians, and a credit of around 250 million US dollars. The "Burma Road" (completed November 1938) carried supplies from Rangoon to Kunming.

US aid began with the 1940 export embargoes on Japan and accelerated after Pearl Harbor (December 1941). The Flying Tigers under Claire Chennault (operational from August 1941) became the US Fourteenth Air Force in March 1943. Lend-Lease aid to China through 1945 totalled around 1.5 billion US dollars.

The Chongqing years

Chongqing endured the longest sustained aerial bombing of any city in the war. Between February 1938 and August 1943 Japanese air raids killed around 12,000 and destroyed much of the city. The KMT state moved to caves and tunnels; ministries operated underground.

The wartime economy of Free China was crippled by the loss of the eastern industrial base. Hyperinflation set in: prices in Chongqing in 1945 were around 2,500 times their 1937 level. Tax burdens fell on peasants. Conscription was brutal; perhaps 1.4 million conscripts died before reaching their units.

Timeline 1937-1941

Historiography

Rana Mitter (China's War with Japan, 2013; published in the US as Forgotten Ally) is the major rehabilitation of the KMT war effort, drawing on Chiang's diaries.

Hans van de Ven (War and Nationalism in China, 2003; China at War, 2018) makes the war the central event of modern Chinese history.

Diana Lary (The Chinese People at War, 2010) is the standard social history.

Frank Dorn (The Sino-Japanese War, 1974) is the older operational history.

Iris Chang (The Rape of Nanking, 1997) brought the Nanjing Massacre back into public memory.

Yoshida Takashi (The Making of the "Rape of Nanking," 2006) traces the memory politics on all sides.

How to read a source on this topic

Sources include John Rabe's diary, the New York Times correspondent F. Tillman Durdin's reports, Japanese soldier letters, Chongqing wartime photographs, and KMT propaganda film. Three reading habits.

First, separate Tokyo's policy from individual unit conduct. The Rape of Nanjing was committed by particular units under particular generals; Tokyo's order would not have authorised the scale, although the absence of restraint was systemic.

Second, treat KMT propaganda about the war as evidence of both Chinese resistance and CCP-KMT competition. The Battle of Taierzhuang (April 1938), a KMT victory, was extensively celebrated; CCP guerrilla actions like Pingxingguan Pass (September 1937) got equivalent CCP coverage.

Third, separate the "stalemate" of 1939-1944 from inactivity. The Japanese conducted major operations (the Hundred Regiments Offensive against the CCP, 1940; Ichigo against the KMT, 1944) throughout. The CCP base areas grew enormously.

Common exam traps

Treating the war as a single event with one outcome. It was three wars in one: KMT-Japan in the south-west, CCP-Japan in the north and base areas, and KMT-CCP rivalry throughout.

Underestimating KMT losses. Around 3.2 million KMT soldiers were killed or wounded in the war. The CCP figure was around 580,000. The KMT did most of the fighting; the CCP did the political work.

Confusing Nanjing 1937 with Nanjing 1927. 1927 was Chiang's establishment of the Nationalist Government there; 1937-1938 was the city's destruction and the massacre.

In one sentence

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident (7-8 July 1937) escalated into full-scale war that destroyed Chiang Kai-shek's elite divisions at Shanghai (August-November 1937), produced the Rape of Nanjing (December 1937), forced the capital to Chongqing (October 1938), and settled into a stalemate during which the KMT bore the conventional fighting from Sichuan while the CCP expanded base areas behind Japanese lines, setting the conditions for the post-war civil war.