Mediterranean and Middle East. The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan between and , following a period of war localized to Manchuria that started in It was the largest Asian war in the 20th century [ 26 ] and has been described as "the Asian Holocaust", in reference to the scale of Japanese war crimes against Chinese civilians.
On 18 September , the Japanese staged the Mukden incident , a false flag event fabricated to justify their invasion of Manchuria and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo. This is sometimes marked as the beginning of the war. As a Japanese invasion became imminent, Chiang still refused to form a united front before he was placed under house arrest by his subordinates who forced him to form the Second United Front in late in order to resist the Japanese invasion together.
The full-scale war began on 7 July with the Marco Polo Bridge incident near Beijing, which prompted a full-scale Japanese invasion of the rest of China. The Japanese captured the capital of Nanjing in and perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre. After failing to stop the Japanese capture of Wuhan in , then China's de facto capital at the time, the Nationalist government relocated to Chongqing in the Chinese interior.
By , after Chinese victories at Changsha and with Japan's lines of communications stretched deep into the interior, the war reached a stalemate. The Japanese were unable to defeat Chinese Communist Party forces in Shaanxi , who waged a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare. In November , Chinese nationalist forces launched a large scale winter offensive , and in August , communist forces launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive in central China.
China launched large counteroffensives in South China and repulsed a failed Japanese invasion of West Hunan and recaptured Japanese occupied regions of Guangxi.
