Chinese Red Army
The Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, renamed Chinese People's Red Army in 1936 known as the Chinese Red Army or the Red Army, was the armed forces of the Communist Party of China from 1928 to 1937. The Red Army was incorporated into the National Revolutionary Army as part of the Second United Front with the Kuomintang to fight against the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937. In the stages of the Chinese Civil War, they were renamed the People's Liberation Army. In the summer of 1927, the Communist Party of China took over the Nationalist forces' two divisions and led a military mutiny; the Nationalist forces' General He Long commanded the 20th Corps to join them. They planned to occupy Guangzhou. However, they were defeated before they reached Guangzhou with only a few thousand men surviving the battle. Zhu De lead a column of survivors to Hunan Province to fight in the Autumn Harvest Uprising where they were defeated again. After the failed uprisings, Mao Zedong took over command of the 1,000 survivors and established a revolutionary base area in Jinggang Mountains.
The two armies joined forces in the following year. In the winter of 1927, the CCP planned to conquer Guangzhou. Between 1928 and 1929, the CCP launched multiple uprisings. Although most of them failed, several small-scale units were created, such as Mao Zedong and Zhu De's Fourth Army, which totaled about 6,000 men in the summer of 1928 and fought in Jiangxi Province. In the summer of 1928, Peng Dehuai, the Nationalist forces' Regimental Commander, led a military mutiny. Nanchang Uprising's survivor, He Long created an army in his hometown, with former government soldiers as the main fighting force. In early 1930, more red armies were created and the number of red soldiers grew rapidly. By the summer of 1930, the Chinese Red Army had grown to more than 100,000 soldiers and had several base areas, such as in southern and northern Jiangxi Province, western Hubei Province, eastern Hunan Province, among others. Peng Dehuai's Fifth Army occupied Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. After the attack, Jiangxi Province became the largest base area of the Chinese Red Army.
In the autumn of 1930, Deng Xiaoping's Seventh Army left its base area in Guangxi Province. In 1931, the Chinese Red Army defeated the Nationalist forces three times with a large-scale attack, causing the Nationalist forces to lose nearly 100,000 soldiers. Several smaller red armies formed a group army. In the summer of 1931, General Zhang Guotao arrived at the Fourth Red Army's base area and took over the army. Most of the Fourth Red Army's senior officers were killed by him, including Xu Jishen, Zhou Weijiong, Xiaofang. Similar movements occurred in western Hubei Province. In the fall of 1932, the Nationalist forces gathered 300,000 soldiers to attack the Fourth Red Army. Most of the Nationalist forces' future generals participated in this battle such as Huang Wei, Du Yuming, Sun Li-jen, others. Having lost more than half of its soldiers, the Fourth Red Army was defeated and had to retreat from its base area, he Long's Third Army sustained significant loses, with more than 10,000 soldiers losing their lives after leaving western Hubei Province.
During this time, there were several battles between the Nationalist forces and Jiangxi Province's First Red Army. In the spring of 1933, the First Red Army defeated the Nationalist forces' fourth large-scale attack and eliminated two and a half of its elite divisions. Several of the Nationalist forces' generals were captured. In 1933, the Fourth Red Army recruited more than 80,000 soldiers; this caused Sichuan Province's warlord Liu Xiang to gather 200,000 troops to attack the Fourth Red Army in autumn. In 1934, the Nationalist forces purchased new German weapons and launched a fifth large-scale attack on the Red Army's base area in Jiangxi Province; the First Red Army lost more than 50,000 soldiers in this battle and had to leave Jiangxi Province to establish a new base. This was the beginning of the Long March. About 30,000 soldiers were left to defend the base areas in southern China. During the same time, the Fourth Red Army defeated Liu Xiang's attacks, who lost more than 80,000 soldiers in battle.
Before the First Red Army began the Long March, Xiao Ke's Sixth Legion arrived at eastern Guizhou Province and joined forces with He Long's Third Army. After this, the Third Army changed its designation to Second Legion. In the autumn of 1935, the First Red Army arrived in northern Shaanxi Province with only 6,000 soldiers after losing more than 80,000 along the way. During this same time, the Fourth Red Army moved to northern Sichuan Province and planned to attack Chengdu. By the end of 1935, they were defeated. Therefore, they were forced to move to southern Gansu Province and wait for He Long's Second Legion and Sixth Legion to arrive. In the summer of 1936, the Second Legion, the Sixth Legion and the Thirty-second Army formed a new group army, it was named the Second Red Army and He Long was tasked with being its commander. The Second Red Army and Fourth Red Army arrived in north Shaanxi Province in the autumn of 1936. Around the same time 21,000 soldiers from the Fourth Red Army attacked G
People's Liberation Army
The Chinese People's Liberation Army is the armed forces of the People's Republic of China and its founding and ruling political party, the Communist Party of China. The PLA consists of five professional service branches: the Ground Force, Air Force, Rocket Force, the Strategic Support Force. Units around the country are assigned to one of five theater commands by geographical location; the PLA is the world's largest military force and constitutes the second largest defence budget in the world. It is one of the fastest modernising military powers in the world and has been termed as a potential military superpower, with significant regional defense and rising global power projection capabilities. China is the third largest arms exporter in the world; the PLA is under the command of the Central Military Commission of the CPC. It is obliged to follow the principle of civilian control of the military, although in practical terms this principle has been implemented in such a way as to ensure the PLA is under the absolute control of the Communist Party.
Its commander in chief is the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. The Ministry of National Defense, which operates under the State Council, does not exercise any authority over the PLA and is far less powerful than the CMC. Military service is compulsory by law. In times of national emergency, the People's Armed Police and the People's Liberation Army militia act as a reserve and support element for the PLAGF. Former CMC chairman Hu Jintao had defined the missions of the PLA as: To consolidate the ruling status of the Communist Party To ensure China's sovereignty, territorial integrity, domestic security to continue national development To safeguard China's national interests To help maintain world peace The People's Liberation Army was founded on 1 August 1927 during the Nanchang uprising when troops of the Kuomintang rebelled under the leadership of Zhu De, He Long, Ye Jianying and Zhou Enlai after the massacre of the Communists by Chiang Kai-shek, they were known as the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, or the Red Army.
Between 1934 and 1935, the Red Army survived several campaigns led against it by Chiang Kai-Shek and engaged in the Long March. During the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945, the Communist military forces were nominally integrated into the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China forming two main units known as the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army. During this time, these two military groups employed guerrilla tactics avoiding large-scale battles with the Japanese with some exceptions while at the same time consolidating their ground by absorbing nationalist troops and paramilitary forces behind Japanese lines into their forces. After the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the Communist Party merged the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army, renaming the new million-strong force the "People's Liberation Army", they won the Chinese Civil War, establishing the People's Republic of China in 1949. The PLA saw a huge reorganisation with the establishment of the Air Force leadership structure in November 1949 followed by the Navy leadership the following April.
In 1950, the leadership structures of the artillery, armoured troops, air defence troops, public security forces, worker–soldier militias were established. The chemical warfare defence forces, the railroad forces, the communications forces, the strategic forces, as well as other separate forces, were established on, all these depended on the leadership of the Communist Party and the National People's Congress via the Central Military Commission. During the 1950s, the PLA with Soviet assistance began to transform itself from a peasant army into a modern one. Part of this process was the reorganisation that created thirteen military regions in 1955; the PLA contained many former National Revolutionary Army units and generals who had defected to the PLA. Ma Hongbin and his son Ma Dunjing were the only two Muslim generals who led a Muslim unit, the 81st corps, to serve in the PLA. Han Youwen, a Salar Muslim general defected to the PLA. In November 1950, some units of the PLA under the name of the People's Volunteer Army intervened in the Korean War as United Nations forces under General Douglas MacArthur approached the Yalu River.
Under the weight of this offensive, Chinese forces drove MacArthur's forces out of North Korea and captured Seoul, but were subsequently pushed back south of Pyongyang north of the 38th Parallel. The war served as a catalyst for the rapid modernization of the PLAAF. In 1962, the PLA ground force fought India in the Sino-Indian War, achieving all objectives. Prior to the Cultural Revolution, military region commanders tended to remain in their posts for long periods of time; as the PLA took a stronger role in politics, this began to be seen as somewhat of a threat to the party's control of the military. The longest-serving military region commanders were Xu Shiyou in the Nanjing Military Region, Yang Dezhi in the Jinan Military Region, Chen Xilian in the Shenyang Military Region, Han Xianchu in the Fuzhou Military Region; the establishment of a professional military force equipped with modern weapons and doctrine was the last of the Four Modernizations announced by Zhou Enlai and supported by Deng Xiaoping.
In keeping with Deng's mandate to reform, the PLA has demobilized millions o
Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin abbreviated to pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China and to some extent in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Mandarin Chinese, written using Chinese characters; the system includes four diacritics denoting tones. Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters; the pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang, based on earlier forms of romanizations of Chinese. It was published by revised several times; the International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as an international standard in 1982, was followed by the United Nations in 1986. The system was adopted as the official standard in Taiwan in 2009, where it is used for international events rather than for educational or computer-input purposes, but "some cities and organizations, notably in the south of Taiwan, did not accept this", so it remains one of several rival romanization systems in use.
The word Hànyǔ means'the spoken language of the Han people', while Pīnyīn means'spelled sounds'. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing; this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, issued his Xi Ru Ermu Zi at Hangzhou. Neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing dynasty scholar-official, Fang Yizhi; the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the stunning effect of the kana syllabaries and Western learning there; this galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script.
While Song did not himself create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, further improved by Herbert Giles in the Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892, it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. In the early 1930s, Communist Party of China leaders trained in Moscow introduced a phonetic alphabet using Roman letters, developed in the Soviet Oriental Institute of Leningrad and was intended to improve literacy in the Russian Far East; this Sin Wenz or "New Writing" was much more linguistically sophisticated than earlier alphabets, but with the major exception that it did not indicate tones of Chinese. In 1940, several thousand members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Society's new journal.
Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Fo. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, some contemporary Chinese literature, a spectrum of textbooks. In 1940, the movement reached an apex when Mao's Border Region Government declared that the Sin Wenz had the same legal status as traditional characters in government and public documents. Many educators and political leaders looked forward to the day when they would be universally accepted and replace Chinese characters. Opposition arose, because the system was less well adapted to writing regional languages, therefore would require learning Mandarin. Sin Wenz fell into relative disuse during the following years. In 1943, the U. S. military engaged Yale University to develop a romanization of Mandarin Chinese for its pilots flying over China. The resulting system is close to pinyin, but does not use English letters in unfamiliar ways. Medial semivowels are written with y and w, apical vowels with r or z.
Accent marks are used to indicate tone. Pinyin was created by Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. Zhou is called "the father of pinyin," Zhou worked as a banker in New York when he decided to return to China to help rebuild the country after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, he became an economics professor in Shanghai, in 1955, when China's Ministry of Education created a Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language, Premier Zhou Enlai assigned Zhou Youguang the task of developing a new romanization system, despite the fact that he was not a professional linguist. Hanyu Pinyin was based on several existing systems: Gwoyeu Romatzyh of 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz of 1931, the diacritic markings from zhuyin. "I'm not the father of pinyin," Zhou said years later. It's a lo
Tonghua
Tonghua is an industrial city in the south of Jilin province, People's Republic of China. It borders North Korea's Chagang Province to the south and southeast, Baishan to the east, Jilin City to the north, Liaoyuan to the northwest, Liaoning province to the west and southwest. Administratively, it is a prefecture-level city with a total population of 2,325,242 living in an area of 15,195 square kilometres. Urban population is 506,877, it is known as one of the five medicine production centres in China. Human settlement in the Tonghua area dates from about 6000 years ago. In the Western Han Dynasty, Tonghua belonged to the Liaodong Fourth Commandery. Tonghua was the birthplace of Goguryeo shaman culture. Goguryeo culture originated form Jian in 425 A. D, and the Goguryeo noble tombs were the only independent declarations in the Northeast of Tonghua. Under the Japanese occupation of Manchuria after 1932, a railway was constructed linking Tonghua with the main Manchurian rail network and with northern Korea.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Yang Jingyu led the First Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army to battle the Imperial Japanese Army, was killed in battle. In August 1945 Tonghua served as the temporary capital of Manchukuo, where Puyi claimed to abdicate at the behest of the Kwantung Army. In 1985, Tonghua became a prefecture-level city under the approval of the State Council; the city has a recent record of extreme violence including the Shosankoku incident in 1945, the Tonghua Incident in 1946 and the Tonghua Iron and Steel Group riot in 2009. Tonghua has a monsoon-influenced, humid continental climate, with long cold, but dry winters and hot, humid summers; the monthly 24-hour average temperature ranges from −14.2 °C in January to 22.3 °C in July. During the warmer months, rainfall is enhanced by the mountainous topography, allowing for a generous annual precipitation total of 870 millimetres. However, the monsoon still means that more than 60% of the annual precipitation falls from June to August alone.
Traditionally, Tonghua occupied a railhub position in a region of China noted for trade in only three agricultural commodities. These were marten furs and deer antler products. In the 1980s Tonghua had some success with a wine distillery producing sweet, sticky red wines that proved popular with local consumers. From 1987 onwards a bienniel wine festival was inaugurated, but this and the industry it promoted failed commercially owing to competition with joint-venture wine companies such as Dragon, who were able to produce a product, marketable overseas. Following this failure, Tonghua industry was thrown back on its traditional agricultural products - and a few small but viable factories, including one specialising in artificial furs. A fledgling tourist trade sought to highlight Tonghua attractions such as some impressive ski slopes, the tomb of the local hero General Yang and the beautiful Changbai Shan Nature Reserve for which Tonghua serves as a connecting railway station from the major population centres to the north and west.
Tonghua's population hovers around 300,000, but census information is difficult to assess as it includes demographic information from other towns nearby. The inclusion of these suburbs and surrounding towns swells Tonghua's official population beyond the 300,000-mark. Poor, backward and, at local level, conservatively led, Tonghua was late in benefiting from the economic reforms of national leaders such as Zhao Ziyang. Although the railway provided useful direct links to major cities such as Shenyang and Changchun, few signs of progress could be seen on Tonghua's dirty streets until the mid-1990s, when plans were approved for a plethora of building projects which transformed the city; these have helped fuel a resurgence in Tonghua's commercial strength. Now, significant improvements can be seen and the city is dotted with shops and shopping centers all around. Erdaojiang District has a number of steelworks, tens of thousands of steelworkers are employed locally. In July 2009, workers at Tonghua Iron and Steel Group rioted at news of a takeover deal by owned Jianlong Steel, the general manager of the firm was beaten to death.
The unrest involved 30,000 workers, with up to 100 injured in clashes with police. The takeover was promptly scrapped; the city of Tonghua has become a hub for a range of Chinese pharmaceutical firms, including domestic insulin producer Tonghua Dongbao Pharmaceuticals Ltd. These companies are spread among the various "Industrial parks" found throughout the city, with 46 projects located in these parks in 2012 alone. Investment in Tonghua's pharmaceutical industry is on the increase, with 27 of these projects worth over 100 million Yuan. Other pharmaceutical producers in the area include Jingma and Wantong Pharmaceuticals. Railways from Shenyang to Jilin and Meihekou to Ji'an meets in Tonghua. Trains from Tonghua Railway Station connect the city with Beijing, Shenyang and several other major cities in China. Tonghua is served by G11 Hegang-Dalian Expressway; the Yang Jingyu Martyrs Cemetery is located on the hills adjoining the Tongjiang River in Tonghua and was built to commemorate Second Sino-Japanese War war hero, Yang Jingyu.
It was built in July 1954 and completed in September 1957. The cemetery covers an area of 20,000 m2. There are five buildings in the park, which are classical glazed tile buildin
Hebei
Hebei is a province of China in the North China region. The modern province was established in 1911 as Chihli Province, its one-character abbreviation is "冀", named after Ji Province, a Han dynasty province that included what is now southern Hebei. The name Hebei means "north of the river", referring to its location to the north of the Yellow River; the modern province "Chili Province" was formed in 1911, when the central government dissolved the central governed area of "Chihli", which means "Directly Ruled" until it was renamed as "Hebei" in 1928. Beijing and Tianjin Municipalities, which border each other, were carved out of Hebei; the province borders Liaoning to the northeast, Inner Mongolia to the north, Shanxi to the west, Henan to the south, Shandong to the southeast. Bohai Bay of the Bohai Sea is to the east. A small part of Hebei, Sanhe Exclave, consisting of Sanhe, Dachang Hui Autonomous County, Xianghe County, an exclave disjointed from the rest of the province, is wedged between the municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin.
A common alternate name for Hebei is Yānzhào, after the state of Yan and state of Zhao that existed here during the Warring States period of early Chinese history. Plains in Hebei were the home of Peking man, a group of Homo erectus that lived in the area around 200,000 to 700,000 years ago. Neolithic findings at the prehistoric Beifudi site date back to 7000 and 8000 BC. During the Spring and Autumn period, Hebei was under the rule of the states of Yan in the north and Jin in the south. During this period, a nomadic people known as Dí invaded the plains of northern China and established Zhongshan in central Hebei. During the Warring States period, Jin was partitioned, much of its territory within Hebei went to Zhao; the Qin dynasty unified China in 221 BC. The Han dynasty ruled the area under two provinces, You Prefecture in the north and Ji Province in the south. At the end of the Han dynasty, most of Hebei came under the control of warlords Gongsun Zan in the north and Yuan Shao further south.
Hebei came under the rule of the Kingdom of Wei, established by the descendants of Cao Cao. After the invasions of northern nomadic peoples at the end of the Western Jin dynasty, the chaos of the Sixteen Kingdoms and the Northern and Southern dynasties ensued. Hebei in North China and right at the northern frontier, changed hands many times, being controlled at various points in history by the Later Zhao, Former Yan, Former Qin, Later Yan; the Northern Wei reunified northern China in 440, but split in half in 534, with Hebei coming under the eastern half, which had its capital at Ye, near modern Linzhang, Hebei. The Sui dynasty again unified China in 589. During the Tang dynasty, the area was formally designated "Hebei" for the first time. During the earlier part of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, Hebei was fragmented among several regimes, though it was unified by Li Cunxu, who established the Later Tang; the next dynasty, the Later Jin under Shi Jingtang, posthumously known as Emperor Gaozu of Later Jin, ceded much of modern-day northern Hebei to the Khitan Liao dynasty in the north.
During the Northern Song dynasty, the sixteen ceded prefectures continued to be an area of hot contention between Song China and the Liao dynasty. The Southern Song dynasty that came after abandoned all of North China, including Hebei, to the Jurchen Jin dynasty after the Jingkang Incident in 1127 of the Jin–Song wars; the Mongol Yuan dynasty did not establish Hebei as a province. Rather, the area was directly administrated by the Secretariat at capital Dadu; the Ming dynasty ruled Hebei as "Beizhili", meaning "Northern Directly Ruled", because the area contained and was directly ruled by the imperial capital, Beijing. When the Manchu Qing dynasty came to power in 1644, they abolished the southern counterpart, Hebei became known as "Zhili", or "Directly Ruled". During the Qing dynasty, the northern borders of Zhili extended deep into what is now Inner Mongolia, overlapped in jurisdiction with the leagues of Inner Mongolia; the Qing dynasty was replaced by the Republic of China. Within a few years, China descended with regional warlords vying for power.
Since Zhili was so close to Peking, the capital, it was the site of frequent wars, including the Zhiwan War, the First Zhifeng War and the Second Zhifeng War. With the success of the Northern Expedition, a successful campaign by the Kuomintang to end the rule of the warlords, the capital was moved from Peking to Nanking; as a result, the name of Zhili was changed to Hebei to reflect the fact that it had a standard provincial administration, that the capital had been relocated elsewhere. During the Second World War, Hebei was under the control of the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of Japan, a puppet state of Imperial Japan; the founding of the People's Republic of China saw several changes: the region around Chengde, previo
Japanese invasion of Manchuria
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria began on 19 September 1931, when the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria following the Mukden Incident. After the war, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo, their occupation lasted until the Soviet Union and Mongolia launched the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation in 1945. The eastern parts of Manchuria and most of the Korean Peninsula were under the control of the Japanese empire since the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895. Japan's ongoing industrialization and militarization ensured their growing dependence on oil and metal imports from the US; the American sanctions which prevented trade with the United States resulted in Japan furthering their expansion in the territory of China and Southeast Asia. The Chinese–Japanese dispute in July 1931 known as the Wanpaoshan Incident was followed by the Mukden Incident. On 18 September 1931 the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, which had decided upon a policy of localizing the incident, communicated its decision to the Kwantung Army command.
However, Kwantung Army commander-in-chief General Shigeru Honjō instead ordered his forces to proceed to expand operations all along the South Manchuria Railway. Under orders from Lieutenant General Jirō Tamon, troops of the 2nd Division moved up the rail line and captured every city along its 730-mile length in a matter of days, occupying Anshan, Kaiyuan, Fushun, Szeping-Chieh, Kuanchengtzu, Yingkou and Penhsihu. On 19 September, in response to General Honjō's request, the Joseon army in Korea under General Senjūrō Hayashi ordered the 20th Infantry Division to split its force, forming the 39th Mixed Brigade, which departed on that day for Manchuria without authorization from the Emperor. Between 20 September and 25 September, Japanese forces took Hsiungyueh, Liaoyang, Tiaonan, Chiaoho and Hsin-min; this secured control of Liaoning and Kirin provinces and the main line of rail communications to Korea. Tokyo was shocked by the news of the Army acting without orders from the central government.
The Japanese civilian government was thrown into disarray by this act of "gekokujō" insubordination, but as reports of one quick victory after another began to arrive, it felt powerless to oppose the Army, its decision was to send three more infantry divisions from Japan, beginning with the 14th Mixed Brigade of the IJA 7th Division. During this era, the elected government could be held hostage by the Army and Navy, since Army and Navy members were constitutionally necessary for the formation of cabinets. Without their support, the government would collapse. After the Liaoning Provincial government fled Mukden, it was replaced by a "Peoples Preservation Committee" which declared the secession of Liaoning province from the Republic of China. Other secessionist movements were organized in Japanese-occupied Kirin by General Xi Qia head of the "New Kirin" Army, at Harbin, by General Chang Ching-hui. In early October, at Taonan in northwest Liaoning province, General Zhang Haipeng declared his district independent of China, in return for a shipment of a large number of military supplies by the Japanese Army.
On 13 October, General Chang Hai-peng ordered three regiments of the Hsingan Reclamation Army under General Xu Jinglong north to take the capital of Heilongjiang province at Qiqihar. Some elements in the city offered to peacefully surrender the old walled town, Chang advanced cautiously to accept; however his advance guard was attacked by General Dou Lianfang's troops, in a savage fight with an engineering company defending the north bank, were sent fleeing with heavy losses. During this fight, the Nenjiang railroad bridge was dynamited by troops loyal to General Ma Zhanshan to prevent its use. Using the repair of the Nen River Bridge as the pretext, the Japanese sent a repair party in early November under the protection of Japanese troops. Fighting erupted between the Japanese forces and troops loyal to the acting governor of Heilongjiang province Muslim General Ma Zhanshan, who chose to disobey the Kuomintang government's ban on further resistance to the Japanese invasion. Despite his failure to hold the bridge, General Ma Zhanshan became a national hero in China for his resistance at Nenjiang Bridge, reported in the Chinese and international press.
The publicity inspired more volunteers to enlist in the Anti-Japanese Volunteer Armies. The repaired bridge made possible the further advance of their armored trains. Additional troops from Japan, notably the 4th Mixed Brigade from the 8th Division, were sent in November. On 15 November 1931, despite having lost more than 400 men and 300 left wounded since 5 November, General Ma declined a Japanese ultimatum to surrender Tsitsihar. On 17 November, in subzero weather, 3,500 Japanese troops, under the command of General Jirō Tamon, mounted an attack, forcing General Ma from Tsitsihar by 19 November. In late November 1931, General Honjō dispatched 10,000 soldiers in 13 armored trains, escorted by a squadron of bombers, in an advance on Chinchow from Mukden; this force had advanced to within 30 kilometres of Chinchow. The operation was cancelled by Japanese War Minister General Jirō Minami, due to the acceptance of modified form of a League of Nations proposal for a "neutral zone" to be established as a buffer zone between China proper and Manchuria pending a future Chinese-Japanese peace conference by the civilian government of Prime Minister Baron Wakatsuki in Tokyo.
However, the two sides failed to reach a lasting agreement. The Wakatsuki government soon fell and was replaced by a new cabinet led by Pr
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from July 7, 1937, to September 2, 1945. It began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 in which a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a battle; some sources in the modern People's Republic of China date the beginning of the war to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. China fought Japan with aid from the United States. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the war merged with other conflicts of World War II as a major sector known as the China Burma India Theater; some scholars consider the start of the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to have been the beginning of World War II. The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the 20th century, it accounted for the majority of civilian and military casualties in the Pacific War, with between 10 and 25 million Chinese civilians and over 4 million Chinese and Japanese military personnel dying from war-related violence and other causes.
The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policy to expand its influence politically and militarily in order to secure access to raw material reserves and labor. The period after World War I brought about increasing stress on the Japanese polity. Leftists sought universal suffrage and greater rights for workers. Increasing textile production from Chinese mills was adversely affecting Japanese production; the Great Depression brought about a large slowdown in exports. All of this contributed to militant nationalism, culminating in the rise to power of a militarist fascist faction; this faction was led at its height by the Hideki Tojo cabinet of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association under edict from Emperor Hirohito. In 1931, the Mukden Incident helped spark the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; the Chinese were defeated and Japan created a new puppet state, Manchukuo. This view has been adopted by the PRC government. From 1931 to 1937, China and Japan continued to skirmish in small, localized engagements, so-called "incidents".
The Japanese scored major victories, capturing both Shanghai and the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937. After failing to stop the Japanese in the Battle of Wuhan, the Chinese central government was relocated to Chongqing in the Chinese interior. By 1939, after Chinese victories in Changsha and Guangxi, with Japan's lines of communications stretched deep into the Chinese interior, the war reached a stalemate; the Japanese were unable to defeat the Chinese communist forces in Shaanxi, which waged a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare against the invaders. While Japan ruled the large cities, they lacked sufficient manpower to control China's vast countryside. During this time, Chinese communist forces launched a counter offensive in Central China while Chinese nationalist forces launched a large scale winter offensive. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the following day the United States declared war on Japan; the United States began to aid China by airlifting material over the Himalayas after the Allied defeat in Burma that closed the Burma Road.
In 1944 Japan launched Operation Ichi-Go, that conquered Henan and Changsha. However, this failed to bring about the surrender of Chinese forces. In 1945, the Chinese Expeditionary Force resumed its advance in Burma and completed the Ledo Road linking India to China. At the same time, China launched large counteroffensives in South China and retook West Hunan and Guangxi. Despite continuing to occupy part of China's territory, Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945, to Allied forces following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria; the remaining Japanese occupation forces formally surrendered on September 9, 1945, with the following International Military Tribunal for the Far East convened on April 29, 1946. At the outcome of the Cairo Conference of November 22–26, 1943, the Allies of World War II decided to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan by restoring all the territories that Japan annexed from China, including Manchuria, Taiwan/Formosa, the Pescadores, to China, to expel Japan from the Korean Peninsula.
China was recognized as one of the Big Four of the Allies during the war and became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In China, the war is most known as the "War of Resistance against Japan", shortened to the "Resistance against Japan" or the "War of Resistance", it was called the "Eight Years' War of Resistance", but in 2017 the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive stating that textbooks were to refer to the war as the "Fourteen Years' War of Resistance", reflecting a focus on the broader conflict with Japan going back to 1931. It is referred to as part of the "Global Anti-Fascist War", how World War II is perceived by the Communist Party of China and the PRC government. In Japan, the name "Japan–China War" is most used because of its perceived objectivity; when the invasion of China proper began in earnest in July 1937 near Beijing, the government of Japan used "The North China Incident", with the outbreak of the Battle of Shanghai the following month, it was changed to "The China Incident"
