
Chinese troops defending Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1932.
Wikipedia Commons
IT WILL soon be a year and a half since a skirmish just outside Peiping, on the left bank of the Hun River, led to armed conflict between Japan and China -- a conflict which seems further from adjustment on fair terms today than it has ever been. At least three million armed men, regulars and irregulars, have at times been engaged in major and minor encounters over a territory of more than a million square miles. At least a million combatants and bystanders have lost their lives; great cities have been reduced to heaps of rubbish and huge tracts
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/1939-01-01/war-china-continues